NBA players who tweet late at night don’t play as well the next day, study finds

A new study from researchers at Stony Brook University have proven, at least as far as professional basketball players go, a commonly-accepted belief: Tweeting late at night or in the very early hours of the morning is a bad idea.

In the study, which was published in the academic journal “SLEEP,” researchers cross-referenced more than 100 NBA players’ social media accounts with their statistics from 2009 to 2016.

What they found was a small but not insignificant drop in the players’ statistical output if they tweeted the previous night from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Specifically, players scored an average of one fewer point and a shooting percentage that was 1.7 points lower than games before which they didn’t tweet, per Sports Illustrated. Players also had fewer rebounds, steals and blocks and took fewer shots.

Granted, that decline in productivity could be because players who tweet before a game typically play an average of two minutes fewer than they do in games where they stay off social media. However, the study doesn’t explain if the drop in playing time is a result of worse play while on the court or some other reason. The lower shooting percentage, both from the field and at the free throw line, is independent of minutes played.

In order to prevent the results from being skewed by jet-lag or playing in different time zones, the study only took into account tweets before home games.

For researchers, the results were expected, given other clinical studies that show how sleep can affect performance. What set this study apart was how it was able to quantify that drop in performance, according to a press release from Stony Brook.

“Using late-night tweeting activity as a proxy for being up late, we interpret these data to show that basketball skills are impaired after getting less sleep," lead investigator Jason J. Jones, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University, said in the release. “While experimental studies have shown the impact of sleep deprivation on performance, this study uses big data to provide interpretable results on real-world performance of basketball players.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, social media blackouts have become common for athletes looking for an edge. NBA stars LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving all have not tweeted since the league’s Finals began on June 1.

Late-night tweeting has become a regular topic of discussion in the news due to President Donald Trump’s prolific use of Twitter, which he has said is a way for him to bypass traditional media outlets and speak directly to the American public.

However, a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found 69 percent of registered voters think Trump tweets too much, including 53 percent of members of his own Republican party.

Several of Trump’s most famous Twitter gaffes have come late at night. Shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time on May 30, Trump’s account sent out what appeared to be an unfinished tweet reading, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. The misspelled word quickly became a social media phenomenon in its own right.

At 4:30 a.m. on Dec. 17, Trump tweeted about the Chinese navy seized a U.S. drone, calling the incident an “unpresidented act.”

Trump has repeatedly said he only sleeps four or five hours per night, but according to the researchers behind the NBA study, he might want to adjust that number if he wants to avoid typos.

“Our findings are relevant beyond just sports science research,” one of the study’s co-author Lauren Hale, Professor of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University. “Our results demonstrate a broader phenomenon: to perform at your personal best, you should get a full night of sleep.”

This story was originally published June 7, 2017 at 8:56 PM with the headline "NBA players who tweet late at night don’t play as well the next day, study finds."