Let's revisit the Twitter saga that DeAndre Jordan set off last summer by spurning Dallas and re-signing with the Clippers

Brian Fitzsimmons
Updated
Steve Ballmer on Mark Cuban: We Had Some Heated Words but We're Good Now - 'The Herd'
Steve Ballmer on Mark Cuban: We Had Some Heated Words but We're Good Now - 'The Herd'



By JOHN DORN

Wednesday night, DeAndre Jordan will make his first appearance in Dallas since infamously reneging on his contract agreement with Mark Cuban and the Mavericks back in July.

The series of events set up what could go down as the best day in Twitter's history. In memoriam, we recapped how things went down that fateful day: July 8, 2015.


The emoji war

After hearing word of the Clipper contingent's trip to Texas to meet with Jordan to re-recruit their seemingly departed soldier, a Mavericks group also began flocking to him. This all started when Chandler Parsons tweeted an airplane emoji, or code for him flying out to meet with Jordan.



This was shortly followed up by a tweet from Clippers guard J.J. Redick, who lives in Texas, detailing his form of transportation to meet with DJ.



On Zach Lowe's podcast just days later, Redick described his motivation for what turned out to be the trigger of an all-out emoji assault.

"I was just kind of on my Twitter account, scrolling through my timeline, and I saw a plane emoji," he said. You know, 'Chandler Parsons to the rescue, yaaay!' And I'm just like, 'Alright, we're gonna tweet out a car, I'm already here.'"

Blake Griffin then joined the party:



Now here's where things went from good to great. You remember Chris Paul, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade venturing off on a banana boat, don't you? The day before the DeAndre saga? Well, CP3 then graced Twitter with this:



By now, the basketball world, and the Internet as a whole, was a wreck. But things were just getting started.

The NBA's resident dad and newly signed Clipper Paul Pierce desperately wanted to get in on the fun, but just didn't know how. He tried, though. We presume a Google search of "how to emoji" shortly preceded this train wreck of a tweet:



On Lowe's podcast, Redick explains that even he was confused by this part.

I'm still not sure why he tweeted that out, because he wasn't trolling like, 'Hey, I don't know how to use emojis.' He's got a couple of emoji apps on his phone, neither of which I had ever heard of. I have, like, the emoji app, you know, the one where you type in emoji? He's got some crazy ones, and he's got, like, these emojis I've never seen before. And so, I don't know why he couldn't type that emoji into his actual, you know, Twitter feed or whatever. It was bizarre. I have no idea. I still am unsure as to why it was a picture of a space ship emoji and not an actual spaceship emoji... I'm still unsure of that. Because we talked about it, it just still doesn't make sense to me.


Then, other teams and players got involved! Rudy Gobert of the Jazz responded about as good as anyone could've:



Then, these just kept piling up.










The hostage situation

Just when we thought the day couldn't get any more ridiculous, it turned out it was just getting started. When the emoji nonsense started to fizzle out, the national reporters resumed doing their emoji-less jobs. But it only confused people more.



Yeah, uh, those tweets essentially at the same exact time. But, regardless of what time the meeting started/ended, it apparently went well -- well enough to apparently sway DJ back to LA. But, still, there was more:



THEN THEY STARTED TO PLAY CARDS.

This entire situation was completely and utterly ridiculous. Doc Rivers, Steve Ballmer and various Clippers camped out in DeAndre's Houston home, refusing to let anybody in or out of the house until paperwork was signed.

Oh, and Griffin gave us proof:



Blake was live tweeting a hostage situation from the scene! Well, we thought. In a piece written by ESPN's Ramona Shelburne and Tim McMahon, we learned that the photo was simply found on Google.

Knowing how tense the situation seemed to the outside world, Griffin started Google-searching images on his phone to play up the drama. He found a picture of a chair blocking a door and tweeted it. He found a picture of a tent and tweeted it with the message, "Alright everybody, goodnight!"




Cards and video games! Which card game? Was it Xbox One? PS4? Sadly, we never really found out. We did later learn, though, that Jordan's mom ordered chicken for the Clipper contingent. Griffin spoke more of the night at Jordan's house in a post for The Players' Tribune:

To be honest, the whole thing was pretty boring. It was like a super laid back family party. Some people were watching TV. Some people were playing video games. After a while, I hopped in the car and drove aimlessly around Houston for an hour just to kill time. When I got back to the house, we were sitting around waiting for 11 p.m. so DeAndre could officially sign.


But after all the fun and games wrapped up, there was a firm agreement in place. Well, for DJ, a second one.



The aftermath

Five minutes after it could become officially official, it was. The Clips announced via Twitter -- what else? -- that they re-signed their center.



Still -- still! -- there was more fun to be had. Like Sad Chandler Parsons:



And Paul Pierce being an old man again -- then channeling his former Brooklyn Nets self, showing us the visual proof:



(A flash wouldn't have hurt, Truth.)

After a long day's work, J.J. Redick was finally ready to reverse his F- grading of the Clippers offseason, get back in his car, return home and get some rest.




The aftermath

Jordan apologized via Twitter in the days after he signed, but Mark Cuban wasn't buying any of it. This past week, Cuban declared that he saved all of Jordan's text messages from the courtship, and one day, they'll all be made public.

"Someday I'll let you read all the texts," he said. "We'll get into it and we'll talk about it, but now is not the right time."

It all set up a made-for-tv confrontation that airs Wednesday night on ESPN: DeAndre Jordan's return to Dallas, where he'll come face-to-face with the organization he committed to, and then went back on his word.

ESPN even came up with an epic promo video for the contest, set to Phil Collins, of course.





We'll definitely be watching.

More from AOL.com:
Mike Francesa is on the radio explaining what emojis are
Clippers guard J.J. Redick slams Doc Rivers' offseason moves
Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony are on vacation together, and the Internet is making jokes again

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