‘Vital and essential': the film paying tribute to the weird world of NBA Twitter

The Guardian

25-02-2025

NBA Twitter is a space unlike any other, the Black Twitter-adjacent arena where basketball fans traffic in gossip and hope (however false) while expressing their passion for the game. It's the internet EKG that relates consumer confidence in real time, revealing an attraction to chatter that would seem to outpace TV viewing interest in NBA games. And the readings are hardly restricted to the hardwood.
Like a judicious point guard who knows just when to pass or shoot, NBA Twitter was the organ that circulated the news last Thursday that San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama would miss the rest of the season over blood-clotting fears – and it was also the organ where many sports fans, myself included, first learned that Joe Biden had dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. There's even speculation now about ESPN's Stephen A Smith or Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, NBA Twitter OGs, making a presidential run in 2028. 'It's probably the most vital and essential sports community on the planet,' says Josiah Johnson, undisputed king of NBA Twitter. 'It's a lot of immensely talented people who just carved out a lane.'
Memes & Nightmares, which debuted at Tribeca last year and premiered last week on Hulu, is a love letter to this thriving community told in its preferred love language: these jokes. Directed by Charles Todd and Matt Mitchener and produced by LeBron James's SpringHill Company and Andscape (ESPN's Black culture lens), the 80-minute satire follows Josiah Johnson and comedian Jamel Johnson in their meandering quest to recover NBA Twitter's 'most beloved meme of all time' – the screenshot of Cleveland Cavaliers guard JR Smith squinting blankly into the distance after losing track of the score late in Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals.
The mockumentary framing, inspired by the Christopher Guest oeuvre, was expressly chosen to give shape to NBA Twitter's abstract nature. 'We wanted to make sure the film was equal parts grounded in real life but also native to the digital landscape as well,' Todd says. 'That's when we hit on the idea of: what if a meme goes missing from the internet? How does it then bleed into everyday life in a sort of chaotic and fun fashion?'
NBA Twitter takes up physical space in the film. It tarries at a private party where Johnson announces his social media 'retirement' in a speech that cribs language from Michael Jordan's 1993 farewell address, one in a peach basket full of hoops easter eggs. It tucks inside a desert speakeasy to craft narratives and set agendas. Josiah and Jamel, the self-titled 'Brothers Johnson' (no relation) stand in for Todd and Michener as co-directors (or is Jamel the one who's in charge?) of a meta documentary that treats the missing case of JR Squints with all the seriousness of a deep-state conspiracy, complete with the string board.
It's the sort of deep dive production that has become its own genre on YouTube. 'Interviews' run the gamut from internet-famous NBA Twitterati to The Kid Mero to former NBA wild child Metta World Peace – who, it should be noted, is not the player involved in the film's biggest reveal. ('It was kismet,' Mitchener says of that payoff scene, 'a wild chain of events that all sort of came together nicely.') The mockumentary 'sources' jump down the rabbit hole with both feet, surprising the directors and striking at the heart of NBA Twitter with their willingness to expand on the film's conspiratorial premise. 'We would ask them: 'Who do you think did it?'' Mitchener says. 'And they would take us down their own path. That ended up crafting the narrative of the film.'
There's truth behind the jokes and gifs that suffuse the mockumentary. When Mitchener was mocking up the story concept for Memes with Todd years ago, AI wasn't really a thing. But now that it's taken over the internet and made the user experience objectively worse, the idea that a popular meme could be excised from internet memory isn't so far-fetched. 'The film reflects how much Twitter has shifted,' Josiah Johnson says. 'I feel it every morning, like a little bit of the love has kind of been lost. What keeps me going is just all the amazing people in the community – but with the new algorithm I don't see a lot of those people.'
Even as NBA Twitter has continued to thrive in spite of Elon Musk's best efforts to destabilize the core platform ('I'm not calling it X or whatever else,' Johnson says), the community has not been deaf to the surrounding change in tone. During the social justice movement, NBA Twitter was the leading organizational nerve center for activist sports figures and fans. But that's since given way to general social media toxicity, Johnson laments.
The iconic Meet Me In Temecula meme, one X user's (seemingly) sincere attempt to physically fight a Kobe Bryant critic on Christmas Day, has long stood out as the exceptional case of an NBA Twitter debate being taken to the streets. But with hoops discourse becoming increasingly personal, you wonder if it isn't fast heating to the point of tempting more users to settle scores offline. 'More so than other communities, the point is you have your team, and those are your brothers and family members and you hate the other team, and you argue about stats and truth and fact,' says Mitchener. 'But it's not supposed to be from a place of animosity.'
Misinformation stalks NBA Twitter, too. When Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic was shipped to the Los Angeles Lakers earlier this month, ESPN's Shams Charania – the same guy who broke the Biden news – followed up the scoop with another post to assure NBA Twitter that, yes, the news was real and, no, he had not been hacked.
The bombshell trade, uniformly panned as one of the worst in league history, would lay bare the Socratic irony of NBA Twitter – where false witnesses are verbally stoned (sometimes by actual stars hiding their hands) in the same digital square where parodists hold court, and memes are lingua franca. 'Everyone has a favorite,' Todd says. 'The James Harden eyeroll or even the Alonzo Mourning [lost in many thoughts] are maybe specific to a player or the game itself. But JR Squints is the moment that feels as if it's altering the course of NBA history.'
The meme also perpetuated the popular perception of JR Smith as an unrepentant chucker and Hennessy aficionado who walks through life shirtless. (The New York Times reckoned he was the league's MTP, most tattooed player.) Memes gave film-makers an opportunity to correct the record and let Smith – who matriculated at an historically Black college after retiring from basketball and joined the golf team – throw back some playful jabs. 'You see him go to North Carolina A&T and make the honor roll and the dean's list,' Johnson says. 'You get to sit with him and have actual conversations. It forced me to take a step back and kind of analyze my place and [role] in helping to elevate this stuff, and also try to be the change and move it in the right direction.'
But the heart of Memes is kinship between the Brothers Johnson, which will be familiar to anyone who forged bonds through sports. NBA Twitter takes this to the nth level with how it brings together hoops fans who might never have met otherwise, turning them into lifelong friends with a rapport that extends well beyond the surface level.
Memes is the rare production outside of Donald Glover's Atlanta series that showcases Black men indulging in extreme nerdery and silliness for the sake of it. 'A lot of times the Black experience is limited to struggle, pain, sacrifice and perseverance – all qualities that, yes, are an element of our story and our experience,' Todd says. 'But for me what's often been more compelling and exciting to feature is the comedic sensibilities and subversive nature of who we are. So when we have an opportunity to take a beloved property like Best in Show and recontextualize it for NBA fandom, which is prominent in the Black community, I love that.'
You couldn't ask for a better guide through the absurdity than Josiah Johnson, a former production assistant whose gag tweets would lay the foundation for a massive career as a sports and culture tastemaker. 'I had always heard from mutuals, like 'LeBron sees your stuff,' and I never really believed them,' says Johnson, recalling his early searches for validation on NBA Twitter, before the NBA great followed him back. 'Fast forward, and his production team is reaching out like: 'Yo man, would you ever be interested in doing something on NBA Twitter?' Last night I'm sitting at home watching the film with my family pinching myself like: Wow, this is real life.'
Memes and Nightmares is now available on Hulu in the US