This Week in Social Media Misadventures

Featuring Deni Avdija and Domantas Sabonis.

It’s been an interesting last 48 hours with two unrelated social-media controversies in my world.

On Friday, after the Trail Blazers’ practice session, my friend and colleague Danny Marang asked Chauncey Billups whether anybody in training camp has surprised him. Here’s his response, in full:

“Scoot’s been better. I’ve been happy with Scoot. He’s been playing with that speed and that athleticism that is his superpower. Toumani … Tou’s stood out all month, to be honest with you. He’s getting better. He just does what he does. Deni, obviously we don’t know Deni that well yet, we’re still getting to know him. There’s been a couple days when he’s probably been the best player out there with his playmaking, and just … he’s a basketball player. Everybody else … Ant’s been elite, Jerami’s been really good, D.A. has had some amazing days. It’s been a good camp, man. It really has. And then you’ve got guys like, one day Kris Murray had a day. It’s been everybody.”

Pretty standard stuff. Billups mentioned seven players by name in that answer, giving all of them what the great Ben Golliver of the Washington Post and the essential Greatest of All Talk podcast likes to call “generic praise.” None of the half-dozen or so of us reporters in attendance thought anything of it, and most of us didn’t even use it in anything we wrote or posted.

Over the weekend, a popular Spanish-language Blazers Twitter/X account posted a translation of that quote. Also a fairly standard occurrence.

After that is when all hell broke loose. One of the most notorious and unfortunately well-followed NBA aggregator accounts tweeted, citing the translated version of Billups’ quote, that Billups had declared Deni Avdija the best player on the team. Another prominent aggregator account tweeted it without an attribution of any kind. ClutchPoints made a graphic of it, which you see above.

Now, if someone wanted to make the argument that Avdija is the Blazers’ best player, that’s something you could certainly do. I’d personally give the nod to a few other guys (Anfernee Simons, Jerami Grant, Deandre Ayton), but it’s not a crazy take. Still, none of us who were there remembered Billups saying that and couldn’t figure out where exactly it came from. So we asked him about it on Tuesday after practice and he was just as confused as we were.

“So yesterday, I was doing an interview on Sirius radio in the morning with Sam Mitchell and another host, and they said that,” Billups said. “They were like ‘So, we heard you said Deni Avdija is your best player.’ And I said, ‘I never said that. I don’t know where that came from.’ And Deni is one of our better players, don’t get me wrong. But I never said that he was our best player. I wouldn’t say that he’s our best player, but he’s a very valuable player to us and I’m excited to coach him. But I don’t know where the hell that came from.”

I suggested that it might have come from Friday’s session, when he singled out Avdija as being possibly their best player on a couple of given days of camp.

“That sounds about right,” Billups responded. “There’s been about five guys that I’ve said that about. But this social media phase and age and all of that … Y’all know that I don’t have a problem saying anything that I mean. But I don’t like being misquoted, because there’s too many people involved. I’m not on social media, but all of our players are, all of the world is, and I’m a man of my word. When I say something, I want it to be represented the right way.”

This is a pretty minor incident in the grand scheme of things, and the erroneous quote from Billups was praise of one of his players, so overall, it’s not a big deal or something anyone needs to do real damage control over. But it’s emblematic of what happens a lot. This sort of misaggregation and misattribution has been a problem since the rise of social media, but it’s gotten exponentially worse in the past 18 months, since Elon Musk bought Twitter, got rid of verified accounts and allowed anybody to buy a blue checkmark and—most importantly—monetize engagement. Now, these NBACentral-esque accounts are financially incentivized to post anything they think people will react to, regardless of accuracy or credibility. It’s made the app all but unusable.

I’m pretty vigilant about this stuff, but even I’ll admit I’ve gotten tricked a few times over the years by quotes these accounts have posted that maybe weren’t in the proper context. I’ve also been a victim of it, more so last summer when anything anybody said on a podcast about Damian Lillard’s ongoing trade-request drama was liable to get clipped and circulated. It’s an occupational hazard, but it’s something that could be avoided if everyone would agree to just block those accounts, not engage with them and go to the original source of information instead. But I know that’s not realistic.

The Billups-Avdija story, though, is nothing compared to what happened to me tonight, which is a top-three weirdest thing that’s ever happened in my career.

This week, Netflix released Starting 5, a 10-episode documentary series chronicling the 2023-24 NBA season through the perspective of five players: LeBron James, Anthony Edwards, Jayson Tatum, Domantas Sabonis and Jimmy Butler. You’ve probably seen a ton of press about it over the last week or so. It’s a similar idea to the Quarterback and Receiver shows Netflix did for the NFL last year.

I have not watched Starting 5 yet. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of interest in it, especially once I found out that James’ production company, SpringHill Entertainment, was behind it. Anytime one of the subjects of a documentary is involved in producing it, you know you’re not going to get anything truly revealing, especially from James, who’s as famous as anyone in America besides maybe Taylor Swift.

But earlier this afternoon, I got a message from a friend telling me that a few old tweets of mine, outraged about Sabonis not being named an All-Star, were featured in the series, with my name blurred out.

Right away, a few things didn’t add up. As best I can tell, the blurred-out profile pictures don’t resemble any picture I’ve ever used. (And it might be a stock image of a ball going through a net.)

But more importantly, I never sent any of those tweets. I don’t really have strong feelings on Domantas Sabonis, in any direction. I’ve never met him or interviewed him, and he’s never played on a team I’ve covered. I think he’s really good, and his dad was an important part of the Blazers teams I grew up watching. But I’ve never felt moved to tweet about what a travesty it is that he isn’t an All-Star in relation to his MVP betting odds, something I also don’t pay attention to or care about.

Some of my followers did some detective work and found that one of the tweets was actually sent by LegionHoops (one of the above referenced aggregator accounts the world would be a better place if everyone blocked and ignored), and one of them was from StatMuse, which used to be a useful stats site and research tool before devolving into low-rent engagement farming a few years ago.

Why Netflix and SpringHill decided to stick my name, of all the names, on these tweets when they showed them in Starting 5, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve racked my brain all evening trying to think of any possible connection between me and the documentary, or any explanation for how this happened, and I’m coming up empty. I used to cover one of the other players featured in the series, Jimmy Butler, but that was almost a decade ago when he was with the Bulls. I haven’t talked to him or written anything about him in years.

Where I land is this: if the producers of Starting 5 are going to use a LegionHoops tweet as a plot point, own it. Own that you’re stealing content from an account that itself exists solely to steal content. And do a better job of blurring out the name on the account, if that’s what you’re going to do.

Just like Billups’ misconstrued comments about Avdija, this is ultimately harmless. More than anything, it’s amusing. Somebody somewhere in one of these production rooms thinks I’m a Domantas Sabonis superfan. And while that isn’t true, I suppose there are worse things to be accused of being.

This line of work doesn’t surprise me much anymore. Today certainly qualified.