NBA Centel Account Reactivated a Day After ‘Temporary Restriction’

NBA Centel is back like it never left.

Less than a day after tributes poured in for the parody Twitter account known for posting fake NBA news, it returned to the platform around midday Thursday. 

On Wednesday evening, the person behind the account was “confident” he will be back and posting in the near future after a “temporary restriction,” he told reporter A.J. Perez, who covered NBA Centel for Front Office Sports. His prediction was on the nose. 

A spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment as to why the account was suspended in the first place. An NBA spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. NBA Centel said he isn’t sure what led to the handle’s suspension, though some followers speculated the account was finally punished for not including a label to note the account as parody. (In January, X announced it was rolling out profile labels for “parody accounts to clearly distinguish these types of accounts and their content on our platform.”)

The NBA Centel name is a twist on the highly followed NBA Central account that posts actual NBA news and has more than a million followers. Centel boasted more than 360,000 followers and regularly convinced fans the misinformation stemming from the account was true. The account started in July 2022 during NBA free agency, with the NBA Centel owner previously telling FOS he looked at it as just another sports parody account. 

“Ballsack Sports inspired me and many other troll accounts on this platform,” NBA Centel previously told FOS, referring to the popular fake sports news X account. “He was the first to truly embrace this style of content, which encouraged me to give it a try and have fun with it. I didn’t expect it to gain as much traction as it did. And yeah, it definitely evolved from the beginning.”

Suns star Kevin Durant is credited with coining the phrase “you got centel’d” after using it on an X poster in October who had an insulting reply to a fake Centel tweet about Durant’s bachelor status. Durant said later he regularly checked the account “just to truly see how many dummies come online thinking that they have high IQ.”

The interaction led Merriam-Webster’s X account to jokingly classify the word “centel’d” as a verb. 

Many NBA teams paid tribute to Centel on X on Wednesday night, including the Sacramento Kings, Houston Rockets, Miami Heat, Orlando Magic, and Detroit Pistons, among others. 

ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith also tweeted his condolences, saying “RIP Centel.”