Duke basketball: Plea for Cassius Stanley to tweet much more often

Plain and simple, the Duke basketball world needs more tweets from Cassius Stanley right now.

Duke basketball freshman Cassius Stanley may not have all the answers, but his recent tweets suggest he does own all the thought-provoking questions. Just as the fun was taking off this week, though, the high-flying shooting guard suddenly grounded his free entertainment with one tweeted promise:

“I’m done tweeting until 2021. ✌”

Thankfully, that pledge only lasted all of a couple of hours. Stanley — who averaged 12.6 points and 4.9 rebounds in what may have been his only season in Durham and whose epic dunks, aggressive play, and jovial disposition aided Duke basketball fans in their recovery from the “Zion Williamson hangover” — has always been relatively active on social media.

But the 20-year-old ramped up his efforts on Sunday, three days after the NCAA and ACC shut down all postseason play due to coronavirus concerns.

Seemingly to announce his arrival in the nothing-better-to-do reality most of us are now grappling with, it all started with the following tweet:

Moments later, Stanley apparently had to step away to take care of some business elsewhere:

Since I’ve discovered that I’m too old to navigate TikTok, I have no idea if he was successful there. Upon his Twitter return, though, Stanley began seeking advice from the public on what to watch, leading to a delightful exchange of respect with Duke basketball sophomore point guard Tre Jones:

On Monday, as he was trying to engage the Twitter accounts of fellow Duke basketball freshmen Wendell Moore and Matthew Hurt — in the manner of a five-year-old asking his buddies to come over and play — Stanley tweeted exactly what the masses are surely thinking as so many are now staying inside:

On Tuesday, we might have guessed the craziness that would come later in light of the Los Angeles native’s first tweet of the day:

After expressing his true desire — “I just want to hoop” — he tweeted that “so many questions have popped in my head during this quarantine.” So he began popping off some out-there questions:

Well, while googling that question provides a simple answer — B batteries do exist but have become all but obsolete due to changes in technology — at least Stanley made some of us think about something random we had probably never pondered before. On that note, his next question was his gem:

Mind. Blown. Again, there’s an answer online for just about anything; in other words, these questions give us a way to pass the time by searching for those answers. Merriam-Webster once addressed that question with a public service announcement — “spelling does not always follow basic logic” — and then gave a lengthy explanation of the etymologies, which truly bored folks can read here.

Someone must have warned Stanley the dangers of having too much of a good time, however, for his final tweet before the see-ya-in-2021 one had a more somber tone:

https://twitter.com/cassius_stanley/status/1240041131251060739?s=20

Let’s make sure to take his advice. Yet let’s also be glad he wasn’t serious about his Twitter hiatus because we could currently use all the good-natured distractions that a fella like Cassius Stanley can provide. Plus, selfishly speaking, I need guys like him in order to come up with more of these silly articles as we all wonder when there will next be a need for game recaps and the likes.

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Fortunately, Stanley’s final tweet of Tuesday night — at the time of this article’s publishing, I’m still anxiously waiting to see how he’ll amuse me today — had a competitive feel. Sure, it contained a bit of a bold self-proclamation by the 6-foot-6, 195-pound human F-16, but it was also 100 percent truth:

For more information about COVID-19, visit the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s website or the website for your state’s Department of Health.

Stay tuned to Ball Durham for more updates, analyses, and opinions regarding all things Duke basketball: past, present, future, and in the NBA.