The NBA isn’t my favorite because of the nail-biting games, the insane athleticism or the big highlight dunks. I love it because of how strange the whole thing is. No other major sports league in America has the same amount of melodrama and absurdities among players and teams than the NBA.
If you told me Tom Brady had a burner Twitter account to defend himself against angry fans I wouldn’t believe you; but when Kevin Durant did this it felt totally plausible.
Unfortunately, a lot of NFL drama involves players getting arrested and contract holdouts. While that does happen in the NBA, it seems basketball players have a preference for funny melodrama over more serious scandals.
Each NBA team only has somewhere between 12 to 15 players compared to NFL teams which have up to 52 players. This means that every personality shares a lot less of the spotlight. Mix that in with a large amount of players with unique humor and you end up with a lot of weird and funny quotes.
Foreign Players Bring International Excitement to the League
Recently Enes Kanter, a Turkish player for the New York Knicks, was quoted as saying,“… thinking about the playoffs make my nipples hard.” That happened about two weeks ago at the Knicks official media day.
Knicks fans aren’t the only ones that have international players on their team’s roster, with players such as Steven Adams, an Australian player for the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Recently, at the Thunder’s official media day, Adams told his teammate who had come into the room, “get outta here wanker … go watch a movie.”
Probably the best example of a foreign player immersing themselves in American culture is Joel Embiid. The Cameroonian 76ers’ star decided to shoot his shot with Rihanna while recovering from surgery by simply tweeting:
NBA Superstars make photo history on Banana Boat vacation
In the 2015 offseason something special happened that would change the NBA forever. Superstars Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James were spotted on an inflatable Banana Boat.
Wade at the front with his wife smiling, Paul in the middle with an even bigger smile, and LeBron at the back looking grumpy. LeBron is arguably one of the greatest basketball players of all time and seeing a super star of this caliber straddling a rubber banana brings him down to my level almost.
Clippers-Mavericks trade deal ends with first ever kidnapping of an NBA player by his own team
No other league does offseason drama like the NBA and the best example of this is the emoji war and kidnaping of DeAndre Jordan.
Remarkably just one day after the infamous banana boat picture, Jordan decided to leave the Los Angeles Clippers and join the Dallas Mavericks. However, he hadn’t signed the contract just yet, so his soon-to-be-ex teammates decided to barricade him in his Houston home and wouldn’t let anyone in until he decided to sign with the Clippers.
The pseudo-kidnapping turned into a Twitter emoji war after a Mavericks executive tweeted a single plane emoji, Blake Griffin tweeting a plane, a helicopter and a car, J.J. Reddick tweeted just a car, and Chris Paul simply tweeted a banana and boat.
Plenty of crazy moments on the court too
And that’s all off the court. There have been just as many absurd moments on the court during games. Like the time Manu Ginobili grabbed a live bat out of mid air during a game, or even in the most recent NBA finals when J.R. Smith ran out the clock in a game that he was losing. An iconic moment that perfectly sums up LeBron’s frustrations with the struggling Cavaliers.
That’s why I love the NBA. That’s why when I wake up I check Twitter and Reddit to see what crazy things have happened next in the never-ending story of the NBA. Sure the highlights, big plays and the fast paced game play are all reasons why I watch basketball, but the reasons I come back are the unique personalities, the funny quotes and just the general absurdity.
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