More tears in basketball

There is a an unspoken rulebook for how men are supposed to display emotion in sports. Fighting is fun, of course. But joy has its limits. To succumb to tears of joy, your feat must be justified. And even then, your movements are dissected and ridiculed.

Jayson Tatum yelled “We did it!!!” at the sky after reaching the mountaintop. How unoriginal, the critics laughed. How inauthentic.

The Minnesota Timberwolves danced on the rooftops after reaching the playoffs. Their accomplishment was too small for a celebration so big.

It’s easy to get caught up in this cycle — the way we strip emotion from moments almost as quickly as they happen. A clip appears. We react, we scroll. We live in a perpetual state of pushing the present aside in pursuit of whatever comes next.

Late Friday night, I fought sleep to watch the conclusion of a game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Los Angeles Clippers. The Spurs had clawed back from down 25, and the final minutes unraveled into chaos: strange turnovers, challenged calls, free throw mishaps. When the final buzzer sounded, the Spurs somehow came out on top.

Overcome with relief, the players collapsed into each other in a breathless embrace at half court. When Victor Wembanyama broke apart from the tangled bodies, tears dotted his eyes. He was smiling.

It was a stunning sight — not because of the emotion itself, but because of the moment it emerged from. In an 82-game season, a regular season game is often treated as just another scroll on your phone. You might laugh, you might cringe. Maybe you send the clip to a friend. But before you’ve really sat with the moment, you’re already watching a video of a cat running on a treadmill. (Maybe that’s just my algorithm.)

The NBA regular season has been contorted into something that often feels meaningless. We see stars rest and teams make decisions to prioritize their future — things that really matter.

Wembanyama shedding tears over a regular season game forced the viewer to stop and exist in that moment; to feel what he was feeling. This was not just another clip to scroll past into the endless abyss; this was something that mattered. It mattered because he allowed it to matter.

From the outside, you might assume fans are drawn to Victor Wembanyama simply because of his towering frame. And to be fair, his size and limitless basketball potential are what thrust him onto center stage in the first place.

But the real reason people cling to him — almost nervously praying his body allows him to reach his full potential — has nothing to do with height or wingspan.

In an age that treats vulnerability like weakness, Wembanyama’s boundless passion feels almost radical.

The precedent in modern sports culture is that the small moments aren’t worth celebrating. Everything should be about the end result.

But watching the league’s brightest young star cry after a regular season win reminds us why we watch sports in the first place. Raw emotion is the entire point.

It’s the same reason we love when players fight. Beneath all the strategy and spectacle, what pulls you in is the humanity. Emotion becomes an invitation to stop and feel.

Maybe every NBA game needs a little bit of Nicole Kidman. “We come to this place… for magic… to laugh, to cry, to care.”

A movie theater is a place where we’re given permission to feel something. NBA games are stories unfolding in real time, and if the heroes in these stories aren’t allowed to cry, what’s the point in the first place?