2025-26 Los Angeles Clippers
105 · 2026-04-16 · medium
A decade ago, back before nytimes dot com slash athletic was a union-busting cudgel for the Ochs-Sulzberger family, it was a web site where unfuckable nerds wrote 4,000-word articles about their old baseball cards. (Kyle, you should write for them, they told me.) Now it's a place where NFL head coaches can get clown. Circle of life! I saw an interesting story there recently about an account on X the Everything App that tracks the Instagram follows and unfollows of pro hockey players. It started last November, has gained twenty thousand followers so far, and is striking terror into the entire NHL. "It’s crazy that someone is taking the time out of their day to do this,” said one Buffalo Sabres defenseman who doesn't know what a bot is. “It’s a little bit of an invasion of privacy." I did a double-take, then a triple-take, and then I checked the article date to make sure it wasn't from back when The Athletic really was The Athletic. Tracker accounts date back to the online K-Pop scene in the late 2010s, when Alison and I were sitting next to eachother at concerts shaking our little pink lightsticks. Somebody (usually from Taiwan) would scrape all the posts and stories and comments and likes and unlikes and follows and unfollows from all the top K-Pop stars, then spit out automatic updates with a crontab. Tracker accounts were the fandom newswire, the hourly dispatch, especially after the end of the 140-character era made Twitter useless for anything else. From 2017 on, folks obsessed over metainfo as much as the original posts themselves. And then, after a while, the industry got wise to all of this; every online interaction became purposely artificial. "Hey girl, whatcha up to? [eyes emoji]" "Just chillin bestie, you? [sparkle-heart emoji]" Or just plain commercial. "Gotta get down to Paris Baguette and check out those new cronuts you're having, yummmm! [donut emoji]" K-Pop social media was now K-fabe. If Seohyun really was inviting Taeyeon out to Sunday brunch in Gangnam, she once texted me, wouldn't she be using WhatsApp or KakaoTalk instead of the comment section? Anyway, basketball. There are a few X accounts out there that track X activity across the Association, but everybody knows that Instagram is where the action is. Minutes after the Los Angeles Clippers were eliminated last night in the NBA PIG, Chris Paul "trolled" the franchise that cut him last December with a "meme" that went "viral". Sick-ass burn, yes, but wouldn't it be more convenient to get all the "smoke" in one place? In all likelihood, a proper NBA tracker account will likely be established and institutionalized in time for the 2026-27 regular season. Soon after that, all player and team interactions will become the self-aware simulation the NHL is on its way to becoming. Being on #NBATwitter will be exactly like stanning a K-Pop girlgroup. And if you act quickly, that genius could be you. That's right, I'm giving you a lucrative business idea for literally nothing, no strings attached, with relevant case studies. I'm not even asking for a cut. Just remember all of this when your TMM membership renewal comes up.