The 2019 NBA Playoffs began on Saturday afternoon, and for the next two months, the best teams in basketball will battle to try and determine a champion. In other words, folks, it’s about to go down.
Longtime basketball fans — and by that I mean people who had cable in 2014 — will remember the summer in which ABC and ESPN decided to inundate the airwaves with a playoff-themed video package set to a basketball remix of “Timber” by Pitbull feat. Ke$ha. If you never saw it, or you haven’t thought about it since that postseason came to an end, please, take a moment and watch.
LeBron James on the Heat! Kevin Durant on the Thunder! Roy Hibbert’s in this! As is seven-time All-Star Joe Johnson! There are so many things to love before we even get to Pitbull’s suit, which makes me smile.
ESPN has some of the best people in the world when it comes to making video packages, so it’s no surprise that this was a delight. It’s also the most beloved NBA video package ESPN has thrown together maybe ever, so with the 2019 postseason underway, NBA Twitter rallied together to celebrate its anthem.
https://twitter.com/s_helwick/status/1117037630615691266
The NBA just needs to succumb to the will of the people and acknowledge that the only playoffs anthem we recognize is Timber.
— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) April 13, 2019
So they'd better play Timber before the Nets/Sixers game starts. And they'd better play Timber before NBA playoff game forever.
— 𝐑𝐞𝐲-𝐑𝐞𝐲 (@TheNoLookPass) April 13, 2019
PLAYOFFS!! TIMBER! ¡DALÉ! https://t.co/jzC6yMDJEq
— Sagar Trika (@BlazersBySagar) April 13, 2019
https://twitter.com/saxetniniltiac/status/1117115737129332736
I am not going to pretend that I am a particularly big fan of the original version of “Timber” — as someone who was in college when it came out in 2013, I have heard it approximately 650,000 times — but there’s something so endearing about ESPN’s NBA remix of the song and all the insane close-ups on the faces of various basketball players. It’s a legitimately good remix, and unless you’re someone who loved how ESPN used “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas (which was also very fun), it is the defining NBA playoff song.
Plenty of people will remember the 2014 postseason as the one where Kawhi Leonard ascended to superstardom and the San Antonio Spurs beat the Miami Heat in five games, marking the final time James played for Miami before returning to Cleveland. But for others, the lasting memory of that summer is Pitbull informing us that the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and the bigger their heart, the harder they, indeed, ball.
