New Study Says These Are the Most Trolled NBA Players on Twitter

Image via Getty/NBAE/Garrett Ellwood

A data compilation from TopRatedCasinos.co.uk claims to have learned who the most trolled player in the NBA is. In order to crown someone with this unwanted designation they compiled around 3,000 tweets sent at various players around the league from October 2020 to January 2021. Tweets were then searched for positive, negative, and even neutral words via SEMrush, an online analytics tool.

The result isn’t shocking when it comes to the players at the top. After all, stars are the most visible and memorable players on the court, not to mention they have the most followers. But perhaps the order in which said stars have had hate thrown thier way will be interesting (or at least amusing) to you.

Coming in at first is Stephen Curry. 27.9 percent of the mentions sent at the Warriors guard and former unanimous MVP have a negative tone.

In the runner-up spot was Washington’s Russell Westbrook, which is a spot he snagged with 24.6 percent of his mentions being negative. Rounding out the next four spots were: Joel Embiid (22.3 percent), LeBron James (22.1 percent), and teammates Kevin Durant (21.7 percent) and Kyrie Irving (20.7).

The study even notes that the most-used emoji that Embiid gets is the garbage-bin. Good to know.

As for the guys who get the lowest percentage of tweets, a good deal of them also are stars. To gauge these the same measure was used (meaning the percentage of negative tweets they get). The takeaway here may be that, if you’re a pro athlete on social media, you’re going to get shat on. We all kind of knew that though.

Out of those polled, the player with the least negative mentions was Klay Thompson. Only (a loose term here) 14.6 percent of the tweets sent his way were negative. Making up the rest of the bottom five were Jamal Crawford (15.7 percent), Chris Paul (16.4 percent), Isaiah Thomas (16.9 percent) and Anthony Davis (also 16.9 percent).

Though Curry fields the most negative tweets, he also gets positivity thrown his way. More than 47.5 percent of his @’s are positive, with the analyzed tweets sorting through his mentions thusly: Out of 2,789 tweets thrown his way, 1,325 were positive, 778 were negative, and 686 were neither.

Not to totally dwell on the bad, the study also released results for the players who receive the most positive tweets. So whatever the opposite of troll is (something like “normal functioning human who doesn’t project their anger and misery on others”) these are the players who are the most that.

In first on that more enviable list is Kevin Love. More than half the tweets he gets (53.3 percent) are reportedly nice. Following him are Curry (again, 47.5 percent), LeBron (46.7), Blake Griffin (46.7) and Carmelo Anthony (46.1).

This is unlikely to be dissected by elite minds at major research universities, so form your own conclusions.

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