NBey: Weirdness vs. Coolness
Pro sports, and especially the athletes, project cool. It's the reason kids hang posters on their walls, buy the licensed gear, and yell "Kobe" when throwing paper balls into trash cans. Sports ads are shot in slomo with epic music and low lights, creating a sense of grandeur and inspiration. Athletes are the best versions of ourselves and held to a different standard. Athletes are idealized and revered, for good reason. Athletes are cool.
Nothing is cooler than the NBA right now. The NBA's ascendancy is attributable to a lot of factors like transcendent stars, outspoken voices, and iconic moments. Most of all the NBA is cool. By shedding its bad boy image of the 90s and early 2000s, the league has taken on a new role as the cultural center of cool for a new generation.
But the NBA is also weird and goofy. And all the better for it. Every once in a while, the players, league, fans, and subreddits (well always on /r/nba) sheds the tough cool exterior, and makes the league and the experience a little more fun, a little more enjoyable, and 100% more weird.
With that in mind, here are some weird things from the NBA.
This weird acid trip of an intermission is the video that keeps on giving. Maybe telecasts should skip the commercials to feature more weirdness like this. The giant raptor showing up to Big Shaq's "Man's Not Hot" is definitely a highlight. Raptors fans (i.e. Reddit) have been complaining about the lack of national attention and broadcasts. It's most likely because they're Canadian, but boy the nation doesn't know what it's missing.
TNT is the gold standard for pre/post game analysis. Charles Barkley and Shaq's antics are legendary and have spawned many imitators. And TNT may have stumbled on even more gold in the form of Kevin Garnett's Area 21 show. Full disclosure, I haven't watched a lot of this show (being a millennial with no cable), but between KG's magically attached hoodie to whatever the above video is, I can say that the weirdness factor is turned up to 11 and as I've mentioned, that is always a good thing.
KG's reaction is an emotional voyage, stopping by a feeling of shock, awe, disgust, confusion, and amazement. Everything you'd want from your hype man.
I'll let the caption speak for itself.
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