Over the years, countless sports media personalities around the NBA have fallen victim to false information from the infamous satire page “NBA Centel.” But on Wednesday, the account deleted all of its prior posts, which appears to signal the end of the account for good.
The satirical account, which is slightly different from the account “NBA Central,” which does aggregate accurate information from around the NBA, has duped numerous sports media personalities like Stephen A. Smith and Colin Cowherd and even athletes like Kevin Durant, Tyler Herro, and many others.
Most recently, Cowherd ran with a report from NBA Centel on Monday’s edition of The Herd that proclaimed that the Dallas Mavericks weren’t going to allow fans into the building who were wearing a Luka Dončić jersey for Tuesday’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers. This of course was false considering the game was played in the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles…
Now, when you go to view the NBA Centel account on X, there are no posts on the page, with a message appearing that the account hasn’t posted yet.
It’s unclear whether this means that the account has been suspended, locked, or is perhaps up for review to even potentially be terminated. But regardless, both fans and sports media members have taken notice of the lack of posts on the account, taking to X to share their thoughts on the matter.
“Rip Centel,” wrote Stephen A. Smith.
“#FreeCentel let’s get it trending,” wrote fellow satirical sports account “Ballsack Sports”.
“The type of run Centel went on,” wrote Overtime in a post with a picture of the Golden State Warriors championship celebration.
Even though it appears that someone has stepped in to put an end to the fake news on X from NBA Centel, the anonymous person behind the account is seemingly ramping up the erroneous “reports” on their Instagram page.
On Wednesday, the NBA Centel Instagram account posted that Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James has announced that he will retire after the end of the 2024-25 NBA season, which has not been announced by James to this point.
X, formerly known as Twitter, is still the leading social media platform for sports reporting. So the fact that NBA Centel is seemingly no longer able to post on the platform for the time being is undoubtedly an overwhelming positive for those who want to be able to easily access accurate news without having to make sure they aren’t being duped.
However, we have seen in other sports that there are still plenty of other satirical accounts out there that still operate freely on X. So chances are, it won’t take too long for another account like NBA Centel to emerge in the near future to spread misinformation.