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In The Worst News You’ll Hear About An NBA Team’s PR Twitter Account Today, @Nets_PR Is No More

Remember @Nets_PR, the official Brooklyn Nets PR Twitter account that came onto the sporting scene in a big way when it tweeted that the Nets sported an unblemished record this season in games they won, but started tweeting weird stuff way before that? Fun Twitter account, right? Wish more sports teams could laugh at themselves like this, because after all these are sports and they’re supposed to be fun, right? Well, FUN’S OVER:

[T]he 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.

A unified voice, eh? Is that a fancy way of saying that, once the Nets figure out how to create that unified voice, we’ll start seeing scintillating insights from the account that more closely mirror those of their crosstown counterparts’ PR account?

MSG Network with Mike Breen and Walt Frazier twitter.com/NY_KnicksPR/st…

— NY_KnicksPR (@NY_KnicksPR) March 19, 2013

Hard to say, since according to the story on this from The Brooklyn Game, the Nets aren’t commenting. But you know who is commenting? Twitterers (i.e. the people who read, and loved, the account). They’re commenting. And here’s a sample of how they’re commenting:

Dumb move. RT @uuords Nets PR (@nets_pr), perhaps the funniest account in sports, has been shut down. thebrooklyngame.com/brooklyn-nets-… …

— Howard Beck (@HowardBeckNYT) March 19, 2013

In case you’d forgotten why flacks are the worst: any voice with a sense of humor in PR eventually gets silenced | bit.ly/WCP4sE

— Matt Ufford (@mattufford) March 19, 2013

Doing It Wrong 101. Ugh. MT @mattufford: any voice with a sense of humor in PR eventually gets silenced bit.ly/WCP4sE

— Stephanie Stradley (@StephStradley) March 19, 2013

Dear Brooklyn Nets. You should keep the fun account. People may pay attention to you then: bit.ly/15mlPJR #pr20chat #sportsprchat

— Matt LaCasse (@MattLaCasse) March 19, 2013

BOOOOOOOOOO. RT @uuords: Nets PR (@nets_pr), perhaps the funniest account in sports, has been shut down. bit.ly/WCjpaB

— Russ Bengtson (@russbengtson) March 19, 2013

And there’s plenty more, don’t you worry. Our only hope now is that the negative publicity in the wake of this news will convince the Nets that squashing the account’s voice is a bad idea, and they’ll reconsider. We sent Calder Hynes, Nets PR manager and erstwhile @Nets_PR manager, a message asking if he’d be willing to answer a few questions about all this, and while we’re not holding our collective breath since the Nets apparently aren’t commenting, we’ll let you know if we hear back.

For now, all we can say is the Nets are making a mistake. They found a way to stand out from the pap-laden sports team PR fray, and rewarded themselves by… killing their own ability to stand out from the fray. Who knows: maybe they have something good planned. But they also had something good to begin with. Here’s hoping they realize that.

Shutterstock photo, by Minerva Studio