All told, the vast majority of NBA players on the über-popular social networking website say very little of consequence. Most of their tweets are inane, self-promotional, and add absolutely nothing of value (this is true for most other people in the twitterverse.)
Following in the No Fun League’s footsteps, David Stern and his team want to make sure this thing doesn’t get out of hand. Like, you know, someone sending out a tweet in mid-flight, as he catches an alley-oop … or something.
Yahoo! reports:
“Obviously, there is a happy medium between tweeting before the game and tweeting from our bench during the game,” Stern said by phone. “You want to make sure that pop culture doesn’t intrude on what brought us here, which is the game, and that we show the right respect for the game.”
Stern described the NBA’s guidelines as “nothing too serious. We just need to make sure when it’s OK to Tweet and when it’s not OK to Tweet so it at least focuses around the game,” he said. “It would look unusual for a guy sitting on the bench to pick up his cell phone, and I think we can agree that he probably shouldn’t be writing e-mails.
It’s not about Twitter; it’s about the line of communication. That’s what we’re focusing on. We’re happy to let it play out to see if it merits all the attention that it’s getting. We don’t want to overreact.”
The NFL’s new social media policy restricts players, coaches, and virtually anyone else associated with the production of a game from interacting with the outside world 90 minutes prior to kickoff, and only after having supplied accredited media members with the requisite clichés following each game. I would expect the NBA’s own policy to more or less fall in line with this.
In other words, Scott Skiles can finally have some inner peace.
(image culled from The Baseline)
