I’ve officially had it with NBA Twitter.

There was a time when Twitter was a fun place to keep up with sports news, check the latest highlights, and banter with members of opposing fanbases. Those days, however, are long gone. Today, Twitter has become a cesspool of 12-year-olds and stat-obsessed losers, neither of whom actually watch basketball. As this is a Philly sports website, this exposé will have Sixers-centric examples. Regardless, examples of bogus online behavior like the ones we will look at below can be found across the league. No fanbase is safe, not even the Sixers. Agree with me? Don’t? Hit me up on Twitter and tell me about it.

The numbers don’t lie, but they also don’t mean anything

We’ll get to the kids in a minute. I need to talk about the GROWN. MEN. using made-up analytics to push a narrative. These guys think they’re smart because they can copy and paste a different nerd’s fake stat and post it on an app, which is not accurate, but whatever. What really grinds my gears is that they also believe that constitutes actual basketball knowledge. Let’s take a look at the jackwagon that inspired this treatise against Twitter nerds:

This might be the dumbest singular tweet I’ve seen in a long time. I do not even know what seven of these stats are supposed to be or how they are calculated. What I do know is that Joel Embiid is far better at basketball than Rudy Gobert. How do I know this? I watch basketball every single night. Not just Sixers games, either. Honestly, it’s insulting when people take a sport that I love and reduce it to numbers that mean nothing. Just watch two damn games, and you’ll learn far more than them than you would from reading a lifetime of tweets from accounts like the one above.

As much as I enjoy that tweet, this isn’t a slight against math. This isn’t coming from a guy that hates all numbers all the time, as little as I like dealing with them. I’m probably more intelligent than this clown. Check that, I 100% am. I may present like an idiot, but think how smart you have to be to convince people you’re dumb. Now you may say, “he has you thinking he’s dumb – would that not make him somewhat smart?” and the answer is no, some people just don’t know anything. Folks like that are not concerned with the real world, their existences lie deep within spreadsheets filled with meaningless data, and yet they gain some sick enjoyment from it. They are… statsexuals.

Just look at that ranking. Only to a nerd that doesn’t know basketball is Ben Simmons a 4th tier defender in the NBA. Really upset I didn’t think of statsexuals myself. Shout out to @PostEmbiid for bringing this beautiful turn of phrase to my attention. In a world of chaos online, some Twitter users really do keep me sane.

Can’t pick on the nerds the whole time

Time to roast the middle school kids instead!

Alright, so these 10-13-year-old kids on Twitter are really polluting the platform with garbage. If NBA Twitter is the Pacific Ocean, these kids and their mindless, uninformed tweets are plastic bottles and bags. They have slowly accumulated to a level at which they are impossible to ignore. However, nobody is doing anything about it except complain. Meanwhile, I’m just a sea turtle vibing out on the timeline, and I have to sift through all of this crap just to find a morsel of factual information. Overly complicated metaphor aside, these children are ruining NBA Twitter, turning it into a middle school lunchroom style free for all while contributing nothing of value. How could they? You think I did anything of value at 12? God no.

In a way, it’s tough to blame these kids. They have neither the free time nor the autonomy to watch basketball daily from 7-12:30. Hell, their bedtimes alone screw them out of quality Western Conference matchups. Combine that with pressure to fit in, and they turn into parrots, repeating takes their friends retweeted just to be accepted. It’s tough, but I don’t care. I have to be on Twitter and read their incessant garbage. Get off my timeline and go be sheep somewhere else. It’s honestly a little dangerous too. This influx of uninformed tweens allows for ridiculous narratives to be pushed way too far. The Joel and Ben not getting along saga began with controversy-hungry reporters, but blew up because of idiots on Twitter, many of whom read at a 6th grade level (because they are in 6th grade).

How much of this is driven by Adam Silver’s anti-Sixers propaganda machine? It is too soon to tell. However, we can never discount the commissioner’s desire to see the Sixers fail. Regardless, keep your eyes peeled and stay away from these two distinct groups on NBA Twitter. You’ll thank me for it.

Listen to The Wolves of Broad St.

Mandatory Credit: Ryan S. Conway, Esq. Bring on the lawyers.