After years of the NBA being the most Extremely Online sports league on the planet, the chickens are coming home to roost. ESPN hot takes, podcasts, halftime shows — no matter the medium or the source, players are feeling some kind of way about the scrutiny they’re under. Sure, Alex Wong’s dispatch might be a little inside-baseballbasketball for non-fans, but it’s breezy and distillative enough that you’ll leave with some sense of what the r/nba obsessives among us live with every single day.
Welcome to the NBA’s generational wars, where today’s terminally online athletes are fed up with seeing every detail of their lives analyzed under a microscope. Unlike other, less permissive sports leagues, the NBA has long embraced the amplifying powers of social media—from its early embrace of Instagram recappers like @HouseOfHighlights to its cultivation of NBA Twitter—but now we find ourselves at an inflection point, and its young stars are fed up and lashing out.
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