Josh Huestis leads charge on Oklahoma City’s second-biggest fued

Pictured Above: Josh Huestis making the face he makes when he reads Fred Katz’s tweets.

NBA Twitter can be a punishing place. For some reason, novelty wordplay happens about as frequently as the Andersons get tickets. Electronic media don’t have paper cuts, but they do have this. If you’re a basketball player, and your name shares a passing resemblance to any common basketball phraseology then by god you’re going to hear about it. And so am I. From about a dozen different people.

Fred Katz covers the Oklahoma City Thunder for the Norman Transcript. He is also a person. Josh Huestis is having none of that.

This is where it all started. Using a rudimentary counting technique, I was able to discern that 24 of Huestis’ 42 tweets from the last two months have been at or about Fred Katz. That’s about 57 percent. For context, that’s almost Chris Paul’s career true shooting percentage. That’s better than the Thunder’s current winning percentage. That’s at least 40 percent better than my CYO career free throw rate. Huestis even started his own blog in that time and didn’t give it the same attention.

The man is focused, is what I’m saying. Let’s have more examples, because empirical evidence is key in this day and age.

That’s just a sample. Poke upon jab upon jape. Now to be fair, if you’re into that sort of thing, this is not all Fred’s fault. There are people behind the scenes encouraging, pushing him into this performing this kind of exhibition.

Josh appears to be standing on his own against a conspiratorial force. But you don’t get to the NBA without persistence, and you don’t achieve what he has without knowing how to bring in help. If the Norman Transcript wouldn’t come to Huestis’ aid, he will find others.

Now, I’m not advocating that people should be arrested for making Twitter the thing that it is, but I will say that in general I think Josh Huestis is a nice guy and worthy of support.

Regardless of anyone’s personal opinion of the situation, one’s personal Twitter is their personal place. One should get to choose who they surround themself with.

And Josh is within his rights to suggest you make similar choices.

This is not blind bias at play either. He’s will to give Katz leeway when deserved.

And this type of consideration leads me to believe this is all in good fun. The Thunder live a tense, angry existence right now, and everyone needs a way to release energy. This is just banter, probably, and Josh is just Joshing.

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Oh my god I’m infected.