Kevin Durant is really happy the Golden State Warriors didn’t lose to the Philadelphia 76ers on Saturday night.
He wouldn’t have been able to check Joel Embiid’s Twitter timeline if they didn’t:
KD keepin' it real ? pic.twitter.com/4laGba2HQW
— NBA on ESPN (@ESPNNBA) November 19, 2017
Well, this is just rich.
Among every player in the NBA who might, quite possibly, maybe rush to Twitter immediately after a game, win or lose, Durant ranks somewhere between the captain and a deputy tweeter. He’s had his own issues with social media; we’re at a point in which he needed to deny using burner accounts to wage 140-character—now 280-character—warfare with his critics. And even if he isn’t using a bunch of Twitter aliases, he certainly still cares enough about what people think to scroll through his mentions and get a pulse on public perception…even from the trolls.
Which, you know, fine. We should have no problem with that. Athletes are people too. They have feelings. They aren’t all inoculated against vitriol. Certain stuff will always get to every single of them. But to ostensibly call out Embiid for his use of Twitter is not the greatest look coming from KD.
To be clear, he’s not wrong. Embiid absolutely would have tweeted or instagrammed about the victory. And it sure looked like things were headed that way. The Sixers led by as many as 24 points on Saturday. Embiid was probably low-key mentally mapping out what he’d write on Twitter, and what he’d use as his location on Instagram, while his team was resting at halftime. But just making Embiid’s Twitter a point of issue at all is semi-weird, if hypocritical, of Durant—especially since, if you will remember, he and Draymond Green once said they have no problems with Embiid’s trash talk. I guess things just change when your team is the subject of said social-media snark.
