@Nets_PR, The Trollingest Twitter Account In Sports, Has Been Shut Down

Nets PR, the Brooklyn Nets public relations Twitter account famous for posting absurdist, light-hearted, sometimes sardonic tweets like “The Nets are 32-0 when outscoring opponent (sic) this season,” “That’s the 11th time Reggie Evans has lost his headband this season (career high),” and “Lopez has 12 points tonight … Brook has 10 of those on 5-7 shooting” when Brook played twin brother Robin, hasn’t posted a tweet since February 28th — a mundane note about Tornike Shengelia’s D-League performance.

That’s because the Nets organization has decided to go in a different direction with how they use their PR account — specifically, changing the voice that represents the team’s public relations. The Nets want a unified voice from their public accounts, a voice that the PR account’s nature didn’t align with.

This change was announced at the Sloan Sports Media Conference by Jayne Bussman-Wise, Digital Director of the Brooklyn Nets & Barclays Center, in a panel called “Staying Relevant: Social Media Analytics.” They are now in the process of figuring out how they want to utilize the account, if at all.

The Nets declined to comment on the change.

The account had roughly 1,000 followers at the beginning of the season, and grew to over 6,000 since the tweets were taken over by Nets Public Relations Manager Calder Hynes — the mastermind behind the account’s off-beat humor and random statistical tidbits.

This isn’t the first time the Nets have had issues with their social media voice. On February 6th, a light-hearted tweet about Brook Lopez’s sad demeanor after a loss was accidentally sent out from the official Brooklyn Nets account and quickly deleted. A fan screencapped the tweet and sent it multiple times to Nets CEO Brett Yormark and GM Billy King (among others), demanding that the person running the account be fired for the error.

As for Hynes, though he is no longer tweeting from Nets PR, he still has a personal account @calder_h:

Click here for a sampling of my favorite Nets PR tweets from this season.