The Strange Saga Of Nerlens Noel's Twitter Picture

So Nerlens Noel has been relatively radio silent on Twitter this summer. One tweet in June, none in July. There are two ways we can look at this. A) He has had a busy summer training, vacationing, womanizing. Or we could go psyco girlfriend stalker level option B) and look deeply and cryptically into everything he has done, ascribing a higher meaning to each minuscule action.

For arguments sake, let’s ride with option B. Women have men, men have pro athletes.

Let’s start with the Twitter picture. He went from a relatively normal picture and background in early August to this.

(ALL BLACK PICTURE)

What I originally thought was a picture of Manute Bol blinking while closed-mouth-smiling slightly after dusk was actually just a plain black picture. Pretty weird. Pretty cryptic. Pretty dark.

Luckily some sleuth on Reddit got to the bottom of the picture with this video.

Holy shit! I can’t believe my eyes! The most illuminating video since Loose Change, only with more devastating implications. It goes hand in hand with one of the few tweets Nerlens did make, gushing about how much he loves Boston, a city that would ironically hate him if he didn’t play basketball.

It doesn’t even take tapping in to full stalker girlfriend mode to see he’s hinging at a homecoming. But just as we thought we had him figured out, Nerlens got back into the game by switching his profile pic again and doing some low level roasting with the boys.

In response to this:

And this:

None of them are particularly earth shattering jokes. Joel’s was probably the funniest. But what’s really important is seeing the boys playing nicely with each other. Noel and Okafor have been seesawing back and forth over who looks more likely to be traded. It seems as if fans and executives are pretty split on who will be the better player and who will be the better fit. It seems like there is no consensus.

But my one consensus would be this. Fuck trading with Boston. Fuck giving Danny Ainge anything. Nothing would make me more sick seeing one of those players flourish in Boston. And while Jaylen Brown might be a logical swap, Ainge and the Boston line of thinking is probably more along offering Terry Rozier for Noel straight up. Nah dude. We’re good.

Meanwhile Nerlens’ new Twitter picture is of Money Making Mitch from Paid In Full, a movie I will not pretend to have seen. But the internet told me that Mitch was a flashy drug dealer who is killed by one of his closest friends while trying to raise ransom money for his brother. So is Noel getting forced out of Philly by his close friend Embiid a parallel to one Harlem drug dealer killing another? I mean it’s gotta be, right?

Realistically something’s going to have to give. It would be sweet if we could swing a Simmons-OK4-Embiid starting lineup with Noel-Saric coming off the bench as a change of pace/depth, but that’s very wishful thinking to assume everyone will fall into their roles happily.

Even with Saric giving possibly the quote of the Olympics after being eliminated Wednesday.

It is gonna be interesting.

And if you don’t give any fucks about the Sixers Twitter drama, well here’s a video of James Harden playing defense on his own teammate in he Drew League. It could always be more bizarre.