Rockets fire employee who sent offensive tweet to Mavericks

The Houston Rockets have fired the employee responsible for sending an offensive tweet to the Dallas Mavericks on Tuesday.

With the Rockets leading late in Game 5 and set to eliminate the Mavericks, the Rockets' official Twitter account sent a tweet with a gun emoji next to a horse head emoji, the implication being obvious that Houston was about to put Dallas out of its misery.

The Rockets immediately deleted the tweet and issued an apology, later confirming the firing to ESPN.

It wasn't exactly an appropriate tweet, but the employee's firing surprised many on Wednesday. Chad Shanks, the employee in question, and the team's now-former digital communications manager, sent out a three-part tweet addressing the situation while also changing his Twitter bio to read: "Will probably be tweeting less about basketball now."

Again, the tweet was in poor taste, but the basketball community on Twitter seemed taken aback by the swift and harsh punishment.

Even Dirk Nowitzki found himself asked about the tweet, using the opportunity to take a jab at Gersson Rosas, the former Mavericks general manager and current Rockets VP of basketball operations.

Shanks spoke to The Sporting News about his termination and explained his thought process with the tweet, taking full ownership of the situation:

Once we had the game (and the series) locked up with a minute or so left, I wanted to take a jab at the Mavs (something I’ve done every so often with other teams), and that idea popped into my head. I meant it to just be a play on taking an old horse out to pasture that would get our fans even more pumped up and agitate Mavs fans. Obviously, things didn’t turn out that way. I didn’t think people would equate pretend violence on an emoji horse with actual violence on a real horse. That’s not what I intended, but my job was to anticipate how these things would go over, and I failed.