On Monday, Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey was fined $50,000 for violating the NBA’s anti-tampering rules.
The violation was related to a tweet by Morey about James Harden from December 20th.
But as Kyle Neubeck of Philly Voice (among others) pointed out on Twitter, Morey’s $50,000 tweet was apparently an automated one from an account that tracks your previous tweets.
This was the (since deleted) tweet that ultimately drew the fine for Morey. Pretty clearly an automated tweet but league is not messing around on tampering pic.twitter.com/HXvgFqGmqr
— Kyle Neubeck (@KyleNeubeck) December 28, 2020
If that was the tweet that actually triggered this fine…man, what a vicious blow.
However, in an article for Philly Voice, Neubeck somewhat debunked the “automated” theory, mentioning that Morey’s Twitter account had never tweeted something from the service in question.
(A note on that front: if the service were truly automated, one would expect Morey’s account to be littered with posts calling back to previous moments in Houston, as Morey is one of the most active social media users among league executives. However, a specified Twitter search for the service in question returns no results for the 12-year-history of his account. It may well have been inadvertent, but unless Morey signed up for the service recently or deleted any previous tweet produced by the service, it would have to be a heck of a coincidence.)
So while this does appear to be an automated tweet, it’s an automated tweet that Morey tacitly approved. He may not have sent the tweet, but he was complicit in the automated service sending it (yikes, what a sentence).
[Kyle Neubeck on Twitter, Philly Voice]
