Stern Ready to Bring Order to NBA Tweets

All dreams must die at some point. It's called waking up and going to work, or having someone knock you out of proverbial reverie and tell you the rent's due.

So it was with a heavy heart that, catching up today, I read the report from Marc J. Spears over at Yahoo! that Stern will announce player guidelines for Twitter and other social media:

“Obviously, there is a happy medium between tweeting before the game and tweeting from our bench during the game,” Stern said by phone. “You want to make sure that pop culture doesn’t intrude on what brought us here, which is the game, and that we show the right respect for the game.”

The bad news is that this follows in the footsteps of the quasi-fascist NFL. The good news? It pertains mostly to when players can and cannot tweet:

“We just need to make sure when it’s OK to Tweet and when it’s not OK to Tweet so it at least focuses around the game,” he said. “It would look unusual for a guy sitting on the bench to pick up his cell phone, and I think we can agree that he probably shouldn’t be writing e-mails. It’s not about Twitter; it’s about the line of communication. That’s what we’re focusing on."

But what about the the other stuff, the wacky slice-of-life/stream-of- consciousness goldmine that we here have made a daily feature out of? In typical Sternian fashion, the man's taking a calculated risk (or perhaps asserting authority while leaving a glimmer of hope -- you never can tell with him): “We’re happy to let it play out to see if it merits all the attention that it’s getting. We don’t want to overreact.”

Good news for us, and anyone else who thinks these often inane, always revealing dispatches are the next frontier of player/everyone else interface. As for the Memphis fans upset at Hasheem Thabeet's excessive chattiness, well, you'll just have to hope another Jennings-like crisis forces Stern to crack down harder.

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