I thought that I might as well kick off my journey into writing again with my experience at an actual NBA event. So let’s get it.
NBA Crossover. Where the NBA meets fashion and Culture.
Last weekend I had the great opportunity to be able to go to the NBA Crossover event that was held in Westfield, Shepherds Bush in West London. The idea of the event was to see how, over the course of many years, the league has grown to incorporate fashion and the cultures of the players into the league and how this has affected the NBA on and off the court. This was also an opportunity to showcase how the NBA is coming to an increasing prominence in the UK and how we are coming to appreciate, understand and become more involved in the sport of Basketball. This event had everything from the NBA 2K to virtual reality. The Larry O’Brien Trophy made an appearance and there was even a station for barbers giving out haircuts to attendees. John Collins,who is an NBA player currently plying his trade at the Atlanta Hawks, was also in attendance and really interacted with everyone at the event. He even managed to squeeze some time in to play a few quarters of NBA 2K18. I didn’t get a chance to play him, but if I did, he would’ve got this work.
The inclusion of player culture really was really embraced by Adam Sliver with the allowance of players to wear clothes of their own choice to matches. This was the beginning of the “NBA Catwalk” from the team bus to the changing rooms before matches. You even have certain players such as JR Smith and Kelly Oubre Jr. wearing Supreme gear during their matches. You even find NBA players alongside various other celebrities and influencers at fashion weeks across the globe. Although this wasn’t the case when David Stern was Commissioner. Just before the 2005-06 season however, Stern tried to enforce a new dress code which essentially told all players to turn up to matches in business dress e.g suits, shirt and tie etc. Items such as chains, headphones, caps and clothing like this were all banned. This wasn’t the first controversy David Stern found himself in, and it certainly wasn’t the last. This didn’t sit well with players, especially when you had individuals such as Allen Iverson rocking about in those days, who was one of the major advocates in allowing player to express themselves and to allow their culture to be out on display and expressed in various forms. If you haven’t heard of him then you should really look him up. A controversial player on and off the court and one of the best to ever play the game of Basketball.
Anyway this is only meant to be a short article about NBA Crossover so I’m going to leave it there. I may revisit this topic to go a bit more in-depth later on, so watch this space. It was a great event, and if you’d like to see what went down, then take a look at vlog I posted on the ABGN instagram account below:
To stay tuned with everything that’s going on, make sure you follow the instagram account @abgnblog as I’ll also be posting content there.
Next post: “Welcome To The Lakeshow: LA-Bron”
Stay tuned…
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