The league fined Amare Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler for tweeting during a game this weekend. The thing is, though... they didn't.
...Tyson Chandler was also fined for a tweet that was sent out during a game, although his case is a little different, because the message updated to his account came from an automated service, instead of from an actual person.
Chandler's account was updated by a site called twitterfeed, which will automatically send out a tweet for you when a website's RSS feed is updated. Chandler's website happened to be updated, twitterfeed sent out the tweet announcing this fact from Chandler's account during one of his games, and thus the league fined him for it.-- was on the court not 20 feet in front of me, actively participating in his team's 12th win of the season.
Now I'd like to go off on the league for what it did. But someone else already did and nailed it... so all I can do is co-sign it.
Chandler's feed was updated automatically while he just happened to be playing and an intern updated Stoudamire's feed while he was leading the Suns past the Grizzlies. Anyone with a basic understanding of how Twitter works would be able to deduce these instances quite easily. Alas...
My advice to the NBA? Hire a fifteen-year-old social media whiz to be your Twitter Czar. He'll be able to weed this stuff out easily so all parties can avoid embarrassment.
Handing out fines for these incidents is like giving Rasheed Wallace a tech because someone in a Sheed mask yelled at a ref from the stands. It's dumb. If the NBA wants to redeem itself in front of its increasingly technology-savvy fan base... they'll rescind the fines and take a few minutes to learn the technology. Because this is just embarrassing.
(H/T: Jeff Clark)
