The fall of Twitter, now known as X under the leadership of Elon Musk, has led scores of social media users to look for a new primary platform. With the weight of Meta and Facebook behind it, that looked like it might be Threads.
When Threads was unveiled, there was a huge push from many luminaries in the sports world to embrace the new platform and hope to recapture what made Twitter great. Unfortunately, the buzz around Threads lasted about as long as one Scaramucci. In its place, Bluesky has emerged as the top Twitter/X alternative while Threads has largely lingered in the background.
So you can’t blame the cast of Inside the NBA for wondering what Ernie Johnson was talking about when he read a promo that invited viewers to get involved with the NBA community on Threads… if that is actually something that exists.
The ‘Inside the NBA’ crew learns about Threads. pic.twitter.com/h4vP2JZuqZ
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) May 24, 2025
“What is threads?” Charles Barkley asked.
That then devolved into a conversation between Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal about their wardrobe and, rather unfortunately, some talk about Barkley’s “moneymaker.”
Finally, guest analyst Draymond Green chimed in to educate the cast about what Threads was, saying that it was Instagram’s speaking forum.
While the NBA does have a whopping 10 million followers on Threads, the engagement on the platform is nowhere close to where X/Twitter is at the moment where the league has more than four times the followers. However, on the bright side for Mark Zuckerberg’s fledgling platform, X is holding on by a thread (pun intended) and could collapse at any minute with all of its technical troubles and outages. So maybe there is hope for the platform after all.
