After the Boston Celtics won the N.B.A. Finals last month — defeating the miserable-looking Dallas Mavericks in a gentleman’s sweep, four games to one — the star forward Jayson Tatum made his way to the sidelines for a postgame interview with the veteran reporter Lisa Salters. Wearing a backward N.B.A. Champion cap on his head and wiping his face with a towel, he listened as Salters asked: “What does it feel like to finally be a champion?”
This was not just sideline boilerplate. While the Celtics’ victory had seemed inevitable, this championship was the culmination of a nearly decade-long education in how difficult winning can be. Over those years, Tatum and his teammate Jaylen Brown became cornerstones of the Celtics franchise and pillars of the N.B.A.’s star-reliant system, but they also experienced disappointing and sometimes even humiliating defeats at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Milwaukee Bucks and Golden State Warriors — and amid all that losing, they bore the brunt of fans’ skepticism and anger.
Salters’s actual question, then, was: How does it feel, finally, to be a champion after so many false starts and fumbled opportunities? “It’s so surreal,” Tatum mumbled distractedly before staring past Salters, the reality of victory seeming to overcome him. Then he screamed: “We did it!” He tilted his head back to the rafters and belted it out again: “We did it!”
N.B.A. fans who watched the 2008 Finals between the Lakers and Celtics might have noticed an echo here. After the Celtics’ victory that year, Salter interviewed Kevin Garnett, another star with years of frustrated championship hopes behind him. Garnett, his cap pulled low over his face, seemed to have been rendered nearly nonverbal with astonishment at the win. “Man, I’m so hyped right now,” he began, before throwing his head back and screaming — as if shocked to find himself in this position — “Anything is possible!” Watching that moment in 2008, even I, a second-generation Celtics hater, had to marvel. Garnett looked truly, spontaneously possessed by an ecstatic spirit that wound its way from incoherence to poetry.
Garnett’s interview is part of a canon of celebratory N.B.A. imagery that lives on in the consciousness of fans. In 2000, Kobe Bryant supplied an iconic alley-oop to his teammate Shaquille O’Neal, who dunked it with one hand, then sprinted up the floor, mouth agape, arms raised and fingers pointing up at throngs of delirious Lakers fans. In the 2001 Finals, Allen Iverson shot a long corner two over a falling Tyronn Lue, whom he then stepped over while maintaining disdainful eye contact on his way up the court. Fans fondly recall any number of Dwyane Wade-LeBron James fast breaks — but especially the cold, needlessly savage 2010 dunk in which Wade passed the ball behind his back to a soaring James, his arms extending into a Christ pose at the exact moment James reared back for the slam, as if to say to the Milwaukee fans: Are you not entertained? More recently, Damian Lillard hit a long three over Paul George in Portland, ending that 2019 first-round series and punctuating his disrespect for George’s teammate Russell Westbrook with a curt wave goodbye.
These moments aren’t just about athletes’ physical and mental talents. They speak to the players’ aesthetic instincts, their understanding of what makes sports beautiful to watch. N.B.A. players — athletes whose faces are not hidden by helmets or masks, playing in a league that encourages them to demonstrate personality — are especially good at this. They have sharpened their perception of beauty to such a degree that they produce it instinctively, the same way that daily practice shooting 3-pointers from midcourt allows them to make the shot look effortless during a game. What we find intoxicating about a “great sports moment” isn’t simply the athletic feat, but the way it is performed.
Maybe that’s why Tatum’s interview rankled elements of N.B.A. Twitter, which serves as a collaborative archive of basketball lore. There was jokey speculation that Tatum, who has long looked up to Kobe Bryant, would celebrate his victory by trying to recreate the photo of a melancholy Bryant contemplating the Larry O’Brien Trophy after the 2001 Finals. Soon people began cataloging other instances in which Tatum seemed to replicate famous championship celebrations, from Stephen Curry’s 2022 “What they gonna say now!” to an image that was roughly similar to Chris Bosh’s hilarious 2012 Champagne shower. Tatum seemed incapable of expressing any kind of joy that wasn’t a meme-y in-joke for N.B.A. heads: He celebrated his victory by cosplaying as champions of the past.
On a split screen, a young LeBron stared out from the past at his son.
Tatum isn’t the only player among basketball’s younger cohort with this penchant for nostalgic meme-ification. When Mac McClung won the 2023 dunk contest, he copied the authoritative gesture Vince Carter used to call the game — slicing his hands across his neck and mouthing, “It’s over.” This past season, the Lakers’ D’Angelo Russell and Anthony Davis connected for a dollar-store version of Wade and James’s dunk photo. And in the recently concluded playoffs, the Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards did the famous “Jordan shrug” after knocking down a three over double-team coverage.
The N.B.A. these days is increasingly inseparable from social media: Players beef with fans online and host podcasts, paramours embarrass their N.B.A.-affiliated lovers on TikTok and reporters have a habit of breaking news on X, contributing to an endless, soap-operatic narrative churn. And since basketball unfolds on the internet almost as much as it does on the court, it is steeped in its own archive of imagery — not distant folk tales about Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game, but pristine footage constantly being recycled. Past and present sit side by side. James, the greatest athlete ever to play the game, continues to excel at it, even at an age where he shares the court not just with his former colleagues’ sons but with his own.
And so basketball is subject to the same craze for nostalgia that organizes so much of our culture these days. As the Summer League began earlier this month and basketball fans got to see the league’s newest recruits, conversation didn’t center on their play; it centered on Bronny James’s making his debut on July 6 — “almost 21 years to the day that LeBron senior made his Summer League debut,” one ESPN anchor noted. On a split screen, a young LeBron stared out from the past at his son. So much of how we interact with media these days is an exercise in referencing other media. Why wouldn’t today’s N.B.A. players understand the game the same way, struck with the anxiety of influence not just in terms of how the game is played, but also in how it looks? How could players not be hyperaware of the visual history they’re stepping into?
Basketball’s ascendance to the center of American culture has everything to do with how it channels our interest in multiple fields — music, fashion, sports — into one slick package. Now it also contains Gen Z’s omnivorous nostalgic tendencies. Insofar as this makes longtime fans feel as if they’re watching a real-life version of N.B.A. Twitter, that might be bad news. But there’s reason to believe that younger stars will find their way to their own legendary moments. In a February interview, Anthony Edwards expressed frustration with constantly being compared with Michael Jordan: “I want people to be like, this Anthony Edwards kid, he’s got his own style,” he said. A few months later, he made good on that. In a postgame interview, he invited Charles Barkley to visit Minnesota with a phrase so compelling — so independently memeable — that it was, soon enough, being repeated on the state tourism board’s website. Perhaps, a decade from now, players will be imitating that.
Source photographs for above photo illustration: Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE, via Getty Images. Robby Illanes/NBAE, via Getty Images.
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