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Bryan Colangelo Out as 76ers President and GM for Twitter Scandal

The investigation could not conclude Colangelo himself was the one tweeting, but did find the "evidence supports the conclusion" that his wife was.
Photo by Brett Davis—USA TODAY Sports

The Ringer recently linked Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations and general manager Bryan Colangelo to not one, but five burner Twitter accounts that were directly critical of the 76ers organization. Some digging was done, and despite it feeling like just a tidbit of juicy hearsay, it turned out that all of the burner accounts were tied to a phone number ending in the same final two digits. Once it broke, Philly hired a law firm to investigate the claims and now the investigation is out, as is Colangelo. This afternoon it was announced that Colangelo and the 76ers "agreed to part ways," per PhillyVoice.

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But the investigation was not able to tie Colangelo himself directly to the Twitter accounts. Instead, they found that his wife Barbara Bottini had created them. It sounds fishy, sure, but this whole story is bizarre on its face, so who knows.

In the end, Colangelo was done in by two things: first, the information revealed in the tweets was sensitive, team-related data that only a few people could have known and, second, this is absolutely embarrassing for the team.

You might be wondering why it took the 76ers nearly a week and a half to conclude this sad chapter and, according to PhillyVoice, that's because Bryan's father, Jerry—a special adviser to the Sixers—threatened to make the team's life miserable if they fired his son:

The delay was, in part, due to internal and external politics that ownership had to weigh. More than one person who spoke to PhillyVoice on the condition of anonymity suggested Jerry Colangelo tried to intervene on Bryan's behalf, threatening to interfere with club relationships around the league.

That is a whole other ball of wax, but there is some good news for Philadelphia. With the best player on the planet two days away from being swept out of the NBA Finals and into free agency, they got rid of a major embarrassment just in time to make a run at LeBron.