Bryan Colangelo was accused of handling a five separate Twitter burner accounts that all dealt with insulting his Sixers players.
Advertisement
The Sixers were a peculiar case in the 2010s. They went from making the ECSF in 2012 as a gutsy 8th seed to being the worst team in the league, even starting a season off with a 1-21 record, to becoming a title contender as the decade came to a close. Amidst all of this, was the infamous Bryan Colangelo Twitter scandal.
Bryan Colangelo took up the Sixers job in 2016 mere days after Sam Hinkie famously resigned as the General Manager due to accusations of Hinkie purposefully trying to ‘tank’ for better draft odds. Bryan built up a decent reputation up until this point, even winning ‘Executive of the Year’ honors back in 2007 for the Toronto Raptors.
One of his first moves as the GM or the Sixers was to draft Ben Simmons with the first overall pick. Regardless of what’s transpiring with Simmons in 2021, this was a great draft pick as the former LSU commit has proven himself to be an All-Star caliber point forward in this league.
Seems as though Brayn Colangelo’s career as a General Manager for Philly is starting off with a decent amount of success. Fast-forward two years and this would all come crashing down for him.
‘The Ringer’ doxes Sixers GM, Bryan Colangelo, for supposedly using several burner accounts to tweet about his players.
On May 29th, 2018, Ben Detrick of ‘The Ringer’ wrote an incredibly thorough account of how Bryan Colangelo was suspected of using up to 5 Twitter burner accounts to disparage and flat out insult his own Sixers players and former Sixers employees, like Sam Hinkie.
The Twitter accounts made statements like, “Ask Jah (Jahlil Okafor) if he passed the other team physical? He will not say not to lose other chance. But I bet the farm it’s what happened,” and, “Clown? (In response to a Twitter user calling Colangelo a clown) Why? What did Hinkie build? My gosh, the biased insanity.”
These were all linked to the Twitter username that went by the name ‘Eric Jr’. Another account that Sixers GM was linked to, as found by Detrick, was ‘Enoughunknownsources’. This is the account that tweeted out, “If I had a medium size ladder I would love to knock some sense into Joel’s head right now. He is playing like a toddler having tantrums.”
Funnily enough, the latter account also tweeted out the now famous ‘collar’ message. When a fan roasted Bryan Colangelo for wearing shirts with egregiously long collars, the account tweeted out, “That is a normal collar. Move on, find a new slant.”
Bryan Colangelo owns up to running one of the accounts.
Detrick emailed the Sixers on having found two accounts that could potentially lead to being Colangelo’s. What they didn’t know was that Ben had actually found three more but didn’t disclose this information to the front office.
Bryan eventually acknowledged this ‘accusation’ and even admitted to owning one of the accounts. “While I have never posted anything whatsoever on social media, I have used the ‘Phila1234567’ Twitter account referenced in the story to monitor out industry and current events,” wrote Colangelo.
Surprisingly enough, all 5 accounts found by Ben Detrick were changed from public to private after this email was sent. Quite the peculiar timing.
All in all, Bryan Colangelo stepped down as Sixers GM a week or so after this all transpired. Safe to say that it isn’t really a great sign for the organization when the General Manager is managing 5 different burners on the side, all looking to attack his own players.
