It’s not new for athletes (or coaches) to reconsider where they’ll play, but it’s not exactly commonplace for an athlete to very purposefully and intentionally take a long time to make a decision; announce said decision; and then encounter serious doubts a few days later.
This is what we have in the engrossing — but also stupid and avoidable — drama which has enveloped the Los Angeles Clippers, the Dallas Mavericks, and the whole Western Conference. All three entities have a considerable stake in the outcome of how this soap opera ends.
Yet, while processing all the immediate basketball dimensions of this story (Will the Golden State Warriors have a serious competitor in the Pacific Division? Will the Mavericks be reduced to a lottery team? Will the Clippers get a roster which can make a serious run at a championship?), one amusing aspect of this midweek summer drama has stood out: the centrality of emojis and social media in conveying the thoughts of many interested parties.
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First, some background:
Recall that earlier this year, Atlanta Hawks reserve Mike Scott conducted an interview entirely consisting of emojis. Also, the Houston Rockets’ Twitter account manager lost his job because of a gun-and-horse emoji combination (and some poorly chosen accompanying words) near the end of the Rockets’ first-round playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks. (In an unrelated note, that event, just over two months ago, feels like 22 years ago. I digress.) We had already begun to see several ways in which the uses of social media, hand-held devices, and the internet at large had reshaped both the delivery of published content and the job expectations for people and organizations that manage social media accounts.
With the reaction to the DeAndre Jordan story involving the Clippers and Mavericks, we’ve reached yet another threshold.
Want to know what various Clipper and Maverick players (and league teams) are thinking about all this? Emojis — or in Paul Pierce’s case, images that look like emojis — tell the story in ways that words don’t have to:
— Paul Pierce (@paulpierce34) July 8, 2015
Classic emojis were found in abundance, to be sure:
🍌🚤
— Chris Paul (@CP3) July 8, 2015
https://twitter.com/JJRedick/status/618844949413433344
✈️🚁🚙
— Blake Griffin (@blakegriffin23) July 8, 2015
The above tweet-emojis came from the Clippers’ side of the divide.
This was the Mavericks’ main contribution to an emoji-centric breaking news development on Wednesday:
✈️
— Chandler Parsons (@ChandlerParsons) July 8, 2015
It all made for a very neat and tidy news summary, one that could be encapsulated in a single tweet:
Today's top news:
JJ Redick 🚙
Chandler Parsons ✈️
Blake Griffin ✈️🚁🚙
Chris Paul 🍌🚤
Paul Pierce 🚀— Mary Stevens (@MaryStevensNBA) July 8, 2015
Many younger people in the crowd — those most fluent in the use of hand-held devices and the use of emojis — have probably never heard the name Victor Borge before.
Who was Victor Borge? If you’ve seen him, it’s been in only one situation or context: Your parents were watching PBS on a weekend night during a pledge drive. Instead of regular regular programming, your local PBS station put on several specials in the realms of the performing arts. Borge’s comedy specials often filled this gap, and among the many skits the comedian (also a very skilled piano player) delivered to audiences over the years, none is more remembered than this one:
What Borge did decades ago is something that presaged the arrival of emojis. If there was a sound for every punctuation mark, there could be an image for every emotion or human activity.
Is a picture worth a thousand words in the strange saga of DeAndre Jordan, an NBA version of “Days Of Our Lives?” Yes.
It’s worth many more thousands of retweets, however, if an NBA player is putting an emoji into his Twitter feed.
It’s a new world in the NBA and the modern version of transactional sports activity.
