Sometime in the first half Thursday when Team USA’s historic beating of Nigeria began to grow into a garden-variety blowout into an all-time stunner, Anthony Davis checked in without his jersey on. Sure, he remembered his kneepad armor, the pullover and undershirt, but the jersey never made it. Usually it’s the mistake of a guy who never thinks he’s getting into the game. The irony being that against a team so woefully overmatched as Nigeria, Davis wasn’t going to take long to get off the bench as the 12th guy. He follows in a proud tradition of jersey mess-ups at the scorer’s table.
If you watched the game you could see the whole U.S. bench cracking up when Davis went to the table. NBC’s commentators suspected he’d checked in without permission from the coaching staff, when he’d just forgotten the jersey (this game was already out of hand but not that out of hand to go in without a jersey). Team photographer and forward Kevin Love didn’t let him live it down on Instagram, naturally.
In 2008, with LeBron huffing and puffing laughing like he’s auditioning for your community theater’s melodrama, Donyell Marshall went to check in for the Cavs with just his tank on. Central to why this is funny is that Marshall had been in the league for 13 years by that point; putting on the jersey should have been muscle memory by then.
There’s another reason to reminisce, from 2007. You have to give the next guy some credit, because then-Timberwolf Marko Jaric actually got the jersey on in the first place. And yet it was backwards.
What do you think?
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