On Saturday, Kristaps Porzingis’s Twitter account tweeted then quickly deleted “Los Angeles Clippers” followed by three smiley-face emoji. (The emoji are important, so keep them in mind). This is notable because Porzingis just finished the second year of his rookie contract, has the kind of talent a team can build around, is the best Knicks draft selection since Patrick Ewing, and is my Large Adult Son. The Knicks are also a beached whale of dysfunction, rotting from the head down. The owner, James Dolan, is a flesh-and-blood argument for the estate tax. The president of basketball operations, Phil Jackson, is on a one-man mission to salvage the wreckage of the triangle offense from the bottom of the ocean before his contract expires two years from now.
As a sign of his displeasure with the Knicks being the Knicks, Porzingis ghosted on the customary end-of-the-season interview with Jackson. Opposing GMs, smelling blood and blubber and eager for an easy meal, circled. The Clippers are often mentioned as a potential trading partner for the Knicks. So this tweet got people’s attention! It got my attention! I live in Los Angeles now, and I don’t know how this makes me feel. Porzingis claims that the tweet was the result of a hack. “I have alerted Twitter and they are looking into the incident,” he stated, again via tweet.
Hacking is a serious issue. I think as people alive on earth in the year 2017, we understand this viscerally if not consciously. Hacking is just in the air. Like the weather, it shapes our reality, even if we don’t understand how it works. We entrust a complex web of devices, platforms, and systems with everything from our individual quotidian observations and personal correspondences to, like, the nation’s power grid. Hacks can swing elections, sink movies, derail nuclear programs, and reveal your nudes to anyone with an internet connection. We cannot take hacking lightly. But Kristaps was not hacked. I mean, come on. Of course he wasn’t!
As proof, Porzingis offered a screenshot of the Twitter app showing his recently-used-emoji tab. The smiley-face is not among them.
Couple of things:
- Many NBA players have more than one phone. You know, for various reasons that are personal, and more power to them. I wish all people with multiple phones the best. We should all be lucky enough to need at least three phones simultaneously at some point in our lives. So, just as KP is using a screenshot of some device to argue that he does not use smiley-face emoji, we can easily imagine a circumstance by which Porzingis simply screen-grabbed one of the other phones that he has access to.
- The “Cmon B” tweet was sent 15 hours after the “Clippers” tweet. So even if that is KP’s primary phone, that’s more than enough time to brute-force the smiley-face emoji off the recents tab with only a mild amount of dedication. You could probably get that done over brunch, before the mimosas come out. (Brunching is big out here, KP. I don’t know much, but I know that.)
More to the point, no hacker would do this. Listen, I’m not an expert. If I was, I’d be on a beach in Cyprus right now, laughing a supervillain laugh, and living a life of leisure off my ill-gotten gains. But, no. I’m just a person with a phone and a computer and online banking and several social media accounts who reads the news. I find it hard to believe that a hacker or hacking group would endeavor to take over a young millionaire athlete’s social media account just to tweet the name of a team that he has been linked with in trades rumor instead of, like, raiding his phone for dick pics and credit card numbers.
Hacked social media accounts tweet virus-laden links with text saying, “Hey, check this out.” This would be the first time in hacking history that a hacker tweeted NBA hot-stove information.
Occam’s razor does its work once one takes into account a tweet by model Abigail Ratchford, whose mentions young Kristaps has been recently sliding into:
Ratchford, of course, lives in Los Angeles.
Ergo: Kristaps meant “Clippers” as a DM. He thinks, or he’s heard, that it’s possible he might be playing in L.A. He was sharing that information with the zaftig Ms. Ratchford as one does, because why not.
I can tell you, son, that the sunsets are amazing.
