After a years-long hiatus, I have begun following the NBA again. Although I always enjoyed playing and watching the sport, basketball lost my attention in recent years due to a variety of factors, including my lack of free time. In surprising fashion, the Association has recently regained my dedication and interest for a reason largely unrelated to the game itself: the persistent hilarity of meme culture surrounding all aspects of the NBA.
Growing up in Massachusetts, my early access to sports was mostly filtered through available television networks. The consistent dominance of the New England Patriots made for a highly rewarding viewing experience, despite my family’s unfamiliar background. We often gathered on Sundays to watch games with our family friends, many of whom were longtime, die-hard fans; all of this emboldened my developing sense of personal support and enjoyment. At home, I regularly tuned into cable programs like ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and the New England Sports Network (NESN). However, my parents decided to axe our cable subscription in favor of streaming services when I was 12, leaving me within the confines of local broadcasts. Despite the Patriots remaining easily accessible, the loss of NESN meant I could no longer watch hometown teams like the Boston Bruins, Boston Red Sox and Boston Celtics. An overall lack of sports programming damaged my keen interest in news and commentary, as I lacked analogously engaging alternatives to these shows.
As I grew older, my general interests naturally drifted away from sports, save for the Patriots. I no longer checked ESPN’s website for statistics, I declined joining fantasy football leagues and I stopped reading books related to the subject. By my freshman year of college, the NFL was the only league I cared or knew anything substantial about. When I returned home during the summer of 2022, I found that this was not the case for others. Although we had always talked about football, a number of my friends were now arranging our plans around viewing the Celtics’ 2022 playoff run. Whenever we were bored, the games made for an easy pretext to grab dinner and hang out, a collective experience that has reawakened my past excitement for the sport. After the Celtics’ season ended in a 2-4 loss during the 2022 NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors, I had been keyed back into the world of professional basketball, although my full attention had not yet been won over.
Around the same time of these experiences, an odd trend began appearing across my social media accounts. Perhaps it was simply algorithms recommending NBA content, or maybe just something akin to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Regardless, I began to receive a steady stream of memes and news related to the Association, only increasing in quantity as the next season began. My engagement with these posts only increased their presence across various apps. Humorous personalities, in-group jokes and numerous mishaps established talented players as distinctly exciting characters, a collective fiction shared between millions of viewers. Although this is true of any professional sports organization, the NBA’s fans have elevated this aspect to be just as entertaining as the game itself. Even as a distant supporter, this content was seemingly inescapable. Despite watching an extremely small portion of actual games, I was able to connect with others by joking about the Association’s convoluted state of affairs, continually reinforcing my peripheral engagement. I specifically love the flexibility of Bleacher Report’s brief quotations graphics because of their ability to be deployed within a variety of settings. Other media favorites include Stephen A. Smith’s belligerent commentary and the banter of “Inside the NBA,” a program in which the analysts bounce off of each other’s knowledge and personalities perfectly. Even the league’s current stars have continually engaged me in this manner. My favorites included the memeing of LeBron James’ goofier moments—including times where he appeared to lie without reason—and the nonchalant, salaryman disposition of Nikola Jokić, who treated the game he excelled at like a nine-to-five job. Other notable entry points for me included Kawhi Leonard’s coy, quiet demeanor and Kevin Durant’s witty internet persona.
As with any sporting product, the NBA monetarily benefits from making its non-competitive elements engaging to both casual and dedicated fans alike. While related quips could be made about any professional league’s happenings, the NBA’s exceedingly dramatic flair has made for an excellent comic basis that is yet to be outshined by any other sport’s online following. Acquiring the language necessary to understand in-group comedy makes one feel at home with complete strangers, a parasocial relation especially present among those who support the same team and players. The sensationalized fan discourse around the Association’s events make its stakes seem larger-than-life, especially in conjunction with the aforementioned strength of player and media personalities. Similarly, storylines like the Detroit Pistons’ historic losing streak make the Association feel akin to narrative television. Various successes, miseries, personal beefs and more all congealed into a mass, multi-media campaign demanding my recognition, a pop-cultural zeitgeist which even bled into the memeings of unrelated fandoms.
As I began to truly immerse myself in the sport, my summer return home in 2023 coincided with another Celtics playoff series, ending in a heartbreaking 3-4 Eastern Conference Finals loss to the Miami Heat. My friends and I would regularly recite and repurpose common memes as a way of enjoying the sport in each others’ company, turning the game into a bonding activity for our friend group. People uninterested in the sport itself expressed their fascination with NBA to me through comic mediums; one of my friends remarked on his enjoyment of various characters and plots the league had to offer, despite him being underwhelmed by basketball’s actual gameplay.
With the 2023-2024 season underway, I have started to consistently watch Celtics’ games and follow the league’s standings. Of course, this cannot entirely be the result of Instagram Reels and X filling my timeline with the NBA. The Celtics are a fixture among my friends both at home and at Vassar, something bolstered by their excellent performances within recent seasons. In addition, I genuinely enjoy the viewing aspect of basketball itself, a groundwork laid by my childhood TV consumption and teenage years spent playing pickup. Acquiring a full degree of competency when joking about players requires someone to actually watch their performances in real time, a component of meme culture which reinforces the drive of viewership.
Despite these salient points, the memeing of the NBA and its central role in re-developing my interest cannot be overstated. The oddity of falling in love with a sport through aspects mostly unrelated to the actual game itself is something only made possible by recent developments in media technology and the rapid rate of information exchange. Although I am still far from being an expert, the NBA’s meme culture has pushed me to enjoy watching basketball and learning its history once more, a dedication of time that had previously seemed impossible.