COLLEGE PARK, Maryland — This was part of an actual tweet by an NBA team’s official account:

🐴 🔫

So was this:

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This too: Kaaaaaa-meeeee-haaaa-meee-HAAAAAAA!

These are 30 of the world’s most valuable sports brands, with the average NBA team worth $1.65 billion, according to Forbes. But on Twitter, most teams come across like creative teenagers, frequently engaging in trash-talking conversations with each other using little more than strings of animated GIFs, ASCII art and emoji.

Done less deftly, that approach could come across as out-of-touch. But for the NBA, which has a younger fanbase than all other major professional sports, it works, serving as the foundation for a vibrant online discourse surrounding the league.

To examine the league’s official footprint on Twitter, Capital News Service built a dataset of every back-and-forth Twitter conversation between NBA teams from 2012 to today. In analyzing the data, we found a few common threads that help explain what makes official NBA Twitter so unique.

Causal language is what most sets the NBA apart from other sports leagues, with frequent use of sometimes obscure slang. Take this tweet from the Philadelphia 76ers, using a locally popular term for “thing.”

Rockin’ the new jawns tonight 😯 pic.twitter.com/BBXaQcnelo — Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) February 2, 2018

“We pride ourselves on being unique and consistent voice. The voice and feel we try and go for is very Philadelphia, so using slang words that only Philadelphia people know is part of that voice. We also try to keep up with pop culture to keep things fresh,” said Kurt Gies, senior social media manager for the 76ers.

The teams’ Twitter accounts also present unique personality quirks, some of which have little relationship to their on-court identities.

It makes sense that the Golden State Warriors, the best team of the last few years, come across as pretty cocky. It’s not as clear why the Atlanta Hawks have developed a reputation for extreme sociability, frequently starting long conversations with other teams. It’s also not as clear why the Memphis Grizzlies are really into dogs.

remember to breathe this time — Utah Jazz (@utahjazz) March 10, 2018

Although teams have adopted different management approaches, the accounts are normally run by one or two people with almost absolute freedom in what they tweet.

“There’s not really an approval process – I may run something by our PR staff or community relations staff or partnerships team depending on what it is, but for the most part, I’m the approval process,” said Doug Wernert, social media director for the Detroit Pistons.

A decade ago, NBA Twitter was not nearly as aggressively weird. Most teams only posted score updates and links to team Websites. And, unsurprisingly, fans didn’t really engage. A cadre of young social media managers fluent in Internet culture and meme-speak helped drive change.

“I realized early on if I were a fan, I wouldn’t be following the team account if all it posted were play-by-play updates and the score at the end of each quarter,” said Chad Shanks, former digital communications manager for the Houston Rockets. “It was boring to read and it was boring to create, so I decided to turn it into an account that I’d like to follow – one that didn’t take things so seriously and had a little more personality to it.”

As more teams developed distinct personalities, the number of exchanges between teams grew, and occasionally resulted in Tweets that team executives defined as over the line.