The NBA is 2018’s best soap opera Tuesday was supposed to be a boring night in the sports world. The NBA Finals don’t start until Thursday, the Stanley Cup Final was between games. But then The Ringer dropped this utterly stunning story about Sixers president Bryan Colangelo running five anonymous Twitter accounts to talk trash about his players and leak sensitive information. What happened next is a perfect example of why the NBA seems like it will inevitably overtake the NFL as America’s most popular sport. I know most sports fans don’t care about Twitter but this was literally the only thing sports fans on Twitter were talking about last night. They were digging up other tweets that the original article didn’t include, like ones where Colangelo apparently revealed his political beliefs. The speculated about Sam Hinkie possibly being the source who leaked the accounts’ existence to The Ringer. Joel Embiid, who was heavily criticized by the accounts allegedly belonging to Colangelo, broadcast his reaction to the entire world. Later, presumably after someone from the Sixers got him on the phone, he said he was just playing around. It’s impossible for me to believe this isn’t Colangelo, though. I mean, one of the accounts tweeted repeatedly about the Division-III college team Colangelo’s son plays for. There’s also this bit of inside info from Adrian Wojnarowski: But for me, the big takeaway is that this could never happen in the NFL. Not in a million years. The NFL just takes itself way too seriously for this sort of story to be treated a fun opportunity to crack jokes, the way it is now with Colangelo. If John Elway was found to have a secret Twitter account where he trash-talked Trevor Siemien (which, he honestly should), the NFL would lauch an investigation, Roger Goodell would give a very stonefaced press conference where he talked about “the integrity of the game” and the Broncos would end up being docked a sixth-round draft pick. All that’s going to happen here is that Colangelo will (probably) lose his job and this will become one of those hilarious NBA stories fans talk about for years, like Kurt Rambis liking a porn tweet. What a great league. This guy isn’t as good at covering his tracks as Bryan Colangelo Colangelo was able to keep the Twitter accounts under wraps for years—this New Jersey coach who fabricated an entire track meet barely lasted a week. Corey Johnson said his team, the Newark Flames Track Club, participated in a meet called Brick City Invitational on May 20. He entered times for the races into a popular timekeeping website, adding results for at least five other teams. But the meet never happened. He made the whole thing up to make his runners look better. The whole thing fell apart when people whose teams were listed as attending the meet called foul. "Notre Dame never heard of this meet," Joe McLaughlin, head coach of Notre Dame in Palisades Park, told NorthJersey.com. "And we never entered this meet. Besides, we hosted our own meet that day." Johnson admitted to faking the meet after the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association launched an investigation. The NJSIAA is now trying to verify the Flames’ other times. Hey man, let me borrow those? Rays outifelder Carlos Gomez forgot to wear sunglasses, so he borrowed a pair from a fan. Bits & Pieces In other Process news, Ben Simmons is dating a Kardashian—Kendall Jenner, to be exact. ...The world’s oldest basketball court is in need of some repairs. ... Some YouTube idiot was arrested for falsley telling people there was an active shooter so he could film their reactions. ... Self-driving cars still don’t know how to drive themselves. ... A Louisiana preacher is asking his congregants to buy him a $54 million private jet. ... The government doesn’t want you roasting marshmallows over Hawaiian volcanoes. That’s a buff cat I’ve gotta start watching more Rockies games The most brutal own of the first century NFL teams are way too stuck-up to do this And the woman in the green plays defense like she’s from the Pac-12 Looks pretty fun until you think about how to clean it One of my favorite obscure sports traditions A good song Hot Clicks is everything you need to know in the world of sports and pop culture, ready for you to read right when you get to your desk in the morning. Email dan.gartland@simail.com with any feedback or ping me on Twitter. Click here for previous editions of Hot Clicks. Visit our Extra Mustard page throughout each day for more offbeat sports stories.<doc-sep>Update, June 7: Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations and general manager Bryan Colangelo has resigned from the team. His wife, Barbara Bottini, admitted to establishing and operating a handful of anonymous Twitter accounts that were critical of players and other league executives and released sensitive team information, though an investigation by an outside law firm deemed Colangelo to be source of her information, an assertion that Colangelo disputes. Update, May 30: The Philadelphia 76ers announced that they are investigating The Ringer’s report linking several Twitter accounts to president of basketball operations Bryan Colangelo. In February, The Ringer received an anonymous tip that Bryan Colangelo, the Philadelphia 76ers’ president of basketball operations, had been secretly operating five Twitter accounts. Since then, we have scrutinized and archived those accounts in an attempt to verify the source’s claims that the longtime NBA executive has been using them as a platform to: Criticize NBA players, including Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor, and Nerlens Noel Publicly debate the decisions of his own coaching staff, as well as critique former Sixers general manager Sam Hinkie and Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri Telegraph the 2017 trade in which the Sixers acquired the no. 1 overall pick that would become Markelle Fultz Disclose nonpublic medical information about Okafor and gossip about Embiid and Fultz to members of the national and Philadelphia media The five accounts pinpointed by the unnamed source included one that followed media members, Sixers employees, and NBA agents but never tweets (its handle is @phila1234567, and it has no account name), and four that have posted tweets or replied to other users. Of those, one was active between April 2016 and May 2017 (its account name is Eric jr, and its handle is @AlVic40117560), two were active within the past five months (HonestAbe / @Honesta34197118 and Enoughunkownsources / @Enoughunkownso1), and one was posting several times a day (Still Balling / @s_bonhams) and as recently as last week. On Tuesday, May 22, I emailed the Sixers and shared the names of two of the accounts, phila1234567 and Eric jr (I did not disclose our suspicions about the other three accounts, one of which, Still Balling, had been active earlier that day; I did this to see whether the partial disclosure would trigger any changes to the other accounts). On a follow-up call that day, Philadelphia’s media representative told me that he would ask Colangelo whether he had any information about the two accounts. That afternoon, within hours of the call, all three of the accounts I hadn’t discussed with the team switched from public to private, effectively taking them offline—including one (HonestAbe) that hadn’t been active since December. The Still Balling account, which had been tweeting daily, has not posted since the morning of the 22nd (I had already been following Still Balling with an anonymous account of my own, which allowed me to see activity after it went private). Since I contacted the Sixers, Still Balling has unfollowed 37 accounts with ties to Colangelo, including several of his son’s college basketball teammates, a former coach from his son’s high school, and an account that shares the same name as the agent Warren LeGarie, who has represented Colangelo in the past. Later that day, the Sixers rep called back. He confirmed that one of the accounts (@Phila1234567) did, in fact, belong to Colangelo. He said that Colangelo denied any knowledge of the Eric jr account. When I asked whether he had discussed my inquiry with anyone else in the organization that afternoon, he said that he had spoken to only one person: Colangelo. On Tuesday, May 29, I contacted the Sixers to ask about the seemingly linked nature of all five accounts. The team responded with a statement from Colangelo: Like many of my colleagues in sports, I have used social media as a means to keep up with the news. While I have never posted anything whatsoever on social media, I have used the @Phila1234567 Twitter account referenced in this story to monitor our industry and other current events. This storyline is disturbing to me on many levels, as I am not familiar with any of the other accounts that have been brought to my attention, nor do I know who is behind them or what their motives may be in using them. You can draw your own conclusions from the two exchanges: Not only did the Sixers confirm that Colangelo was the owner of one of the five accounts in question, but the three that were not mentioned simultaneously went dark shortly after he was told of The Ringer’s inquiry. As we’ve seen with Kevin Durant’s Twitter blunder, Steve Kerr’s it-was-supposed-to-be-a-DM Twitter gaffe from earlier in the season, and the countless social media archaeological expeditions that occur whenever a young player enters the league, risky behavior on the platform is nothing new. The ultimate insiders, players, coaches, and executives are professionally vested in the conversations that swirl daily across social media—but they often can’t speak freely without kicking up a media haboob. This situation might be different. With a 24-win improvement and an exhilarating run to the Eastern Conference semifinals this season, the Sixers were one the league’s feel-good stories. But behind all that could be the story of a team president who has spent the past two years using Twitter to anonymously spar with the media and defend Colangelo’s reputation. Most alarmingly, though, the Eric jr account urged members of the Sixers media to ask Okafor about a failed physical that the account alleges scuttled an in-the-works trade. This is information that has never been publicly reported. The accounts also might have tipped team strategy. Together, these acts, if true, could be severely damaging to Colangelo’s organization and amount to a huge breach of trust between him and the people he oversees. The story begins with a direct message. The Source Our source, whose identity is still unknown, contacted me via anonymous “egg” accounts on both Instagram and Twitter, claiming that they had a scoop. The source explained that they worked in artificial intelligence and, after noticing a “bunch of weird tweets” directed at Sixers writers, used an open-source data analysis tool to link five accounts through commonalities including similarities in who the accounts followed and linguistic quirks. “They all have a pattern of likes, follows, and tweets which are EXTRAORDINARILY similar,” the source wrote in a direct message on Twitter. For example, the source explained, all five follow accounts tied to Sixers players, members of the Philly front office, and beat reporters who cover the team; Toronto Raptors writers; Canadian high school basketball; and University of Chicago basketball. They discuss the same topics, use strikingly similar phrasing, and, at times, have tweeted out identical media images. Some of those shared attributes were odd, such as a distaste for beards and “unknown sources.” According to the source’s findings, the three newest accounts followed 75 accounts in common—roughly half of their total respective follows—with another 52 accounts followed by two of the three. (The Ringer was unable to verify those numbers, but they seem to track with our analysis.) I was skeptical. As a strident critic of Colangelo’s hiring in Philadelphia and his team-building performance over the past two years, I understood why someone who was looking to portray the executive in an unflattering light would consider me an eager ally or a target for catfishing. At first glance, I didn’t believe the accounts could be Colangelo. They were too inflammatory, too reckless. In posts ranging from April 2016 to last Tuesday, the accounts insulted the likes of Joel Embiid and Markelle Fultz; criticized coach Brett Brown; and bashed executives such as Sam Hinkie and Toronto president Masai Ujiri. And, at every turn, the accounts relentlessly defended or promoted Colangelo. The accounts claimed that Ben Simmons wouldn’t have come to Philadelphia if Colangelo hadn’t replaced Hinkie in the front office, accused Sixers bloggers of being biased Hinkie loyalists, and boasted that the critically panned December 2017 trade of Jahlil Okafor, Nik Stauskas, and a second-round pick for Trevor Booker “sounds better and better.” Several posts wandered from organizational matters, debating the size of Colangelo’s shirt collars. When user @Philly_Asshole commented on the executive’s well-documented sartorial preference, “This dude just love collars,” Enoughunkownsources responded, “That is a normal collar. Move on, find a new slant.” Grid View The Accounts Colangelo, 52, has worked in the NBA for almost three decades. His father, Jerry Colangelo, is the former owner of the Phoenix Suns and former chairman of USA Basketball, and has been a trusted colleague of current NBA commissioner Adam Silver and former commissioner David Stern. Bryan Colangelo was hired by the Suns in 1991 and, in 1995, became the general manager. He twice received the NBA Executive of the Year Award, once with the Suns and later with the Toronto Raptors. The elder Colangelo joined the Sixers organization in late 2015—reportedly with encouragement from the NBA—to speed up Hinkie’s so-called “Process,” the slash-and-burn rebuild that amassed draft assets, cap space, and copious losses. Hinkie resigned near the end of that season, after learning that Bryan Colangelo was being hired to helm the Sixers. Two years later, Hinkie is a basketball folk hero who set the team on the course to acquire promising young stars like Embiid, Simmons, and Dario Saric. Even as the Sixers have blossomed into an Eastern Conference power, Colangelo has drawn heavy criticism from fans. Most notably, for his trade with the Boston Celtics for the no. 1 pick in the 2017 NBA draft, which netted the team Fultz, while the Celtics snagged a star in the making in Jayson Tatum and the Sacramento Kings’ lightly protected 2018 first-rounder. Eric jr, the oldest account, was created in April 2016, the same month Colangelo was hired in Philadelphia. The user’s listed location is “South Philly,” home to the Wells Fargo Center. Eric jr’s bio describes its author as a “basketball lifer.” Its combination of tweets, retweets, and follows creates a Venn diagram that suggests one person behind the account. “To me, there is no conceivable world where that is not Bryan Colangelo, himself,” the tipster told me. “Not his wife, not his son, not his dad.” At one point, Eric jr followed 129 accounts, including members of the Sixers roster; members of the Sixers organization, ranging from CEO Scott O’Neil to sales associate Lexi Shipon to co-owner David B. Heller; and a swath of basketball-centric media, especially Sixers beat writers. (Eric jr has also followed The Ringer’s account and that of site founder Bill Simmons.) Eric jr has also followed a number of accounts related to the University of Chicago men’s basketball team. Mattia Colangelo, Bryan’s son, enrolled at the school in 2016 and currently plays for the Maroons. Eric jr has followed four of Mattia Colangelo’s teammates. Eric jr and @Phila1234567 have also followed John-Paul Cavalluzzo, an educator in Vancouver and the former basketball, football, and track coach at Ontario’s Upper Canada College, the high school where Mattia Colangelo played until 2016. In a tweet from November 28, 2016, Cavalluzzo described Bryan Colangelo as “my mentor.” Colangelo, who was hired by the Raptors in 2006 and left the organization in 2013 after being stripped of his GM duties, lived in Ontario before taking the Sixers job. All five accounts, at one point, followed a profile using the name Warren LeGarie, founder of the Las Vegas summer league and an agent who has represented Colangelo in the past. One of the few non-basketball accounts followed by Eric jr is an Arizona man named Lawrence “LB” Bain. Bain’s Twitter bio lists his location as Paradise Valley, a small town in Maricopa County, Arizona, that is five miles from the address of JDM Partners LLC, a financial company where Jerry Colangelo is a partner. An SEC-filed prospectus from 2007 shows that Bryan Colangelo sold 25,000 shares of stock in ProLink Holdings Corp., a company that makes GPS golf-course management systems. On the document, Bain is listed as ProLink’s president and CEO. At the time of publication, Bain had only 53 Twitter followers, including both Eric jr and @Phila1234567, the account that the Sixers confirmed as belonging to Colangelo.<doc-sep>
The NBA has been stunned by accusations 76ers general manager Bryan Colangelo used five burner accounts on Twitter to leak sensitive information and make petty criticisms of his own star players. An extraordinary report from TheRinger.com claims Colangelo went to extreme lengths to attack Sixers players, including All Star center Joel Embiid, while also moving to smear rival NBA officials and defend his own reputation. Colangelo has admitted to using one of the five Twitter accounts The Ringer claims he is behind — but has denied he is the author behind one of the most active Twitter accounts which shared inside information about the club and players. The report also claims Colangelo tried to cover his tracks by making three of the Twitter accounts private when first asked by media representatives if he was behind two of the other accounts. The Sixers boss has denied the accusations put to him in the report. “Like many of my colleagues in sports, I have used social media as a means to keep up with the news,” Colangelo said in a statement. “While I have never posted anything whatsoever on social media, I have used the @Phila1234567 Twitter account referenced in this story to monitor our industry and other current events. “This storyline is disturbing to me on many levels, as I am not familiar with any of the other accounts that have been brought to my attention, nor do I know who is behind them or what their motives may be in using them.” Colangelo has gone into damage control since the story was published, making contact with Embiid to deny any link to the tweets about the Cameroonian center. The Ringer claims one of Colangelo’s burner accounts slammed Embiid during the 2016-17 season for being an “idiot whose head is getting too big” after he was sidelined by injury. One of the accounts tweeted: “Too bad that Embiid danced like a fool and the whole disaster happened, next time he will think twice before mocking his team.” ESPN reported Wednesday that Colangelo called Embiid to clear the air. Embiid told ESPN he accepts Colangelo’s explanation, but also went to Twitter to poke fun at his general manager. “I talked to him and he said that he didn’t say that,” Embiid said. “He called me just to deny the story. Gotta believe him until proven otherwise. If true, though, that would be really bad.” Embiid was just one of many NBA figures torn to pieces by the so-called burner accounts. The Ringer accuses Colangelo, a veteran basketball official with previous jobs in Toronto and Phoenix, of criticizing No. 1 draft pick Markelle Fultz, former Philly stars Nerlens Noel and Jahlil Okafor — as well as former 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie, Colangelo’s predecessor. The accounts also contacted Philadelphia-based reporters claiming to have inside information on players — including injury revelations — and told reporters to ask specific questions before press conferences with officials and players. NBA commentators have declared the burner accounts have an overwhelming supply of insider information — which nobody outside the organization would have been privy to. The so-called burner accounts remain unverified, but NBA commentators have declared Colangelo’s future looks bleak.