December is always a time for reflection on the year that was before we get set to turn the calendar to the next 12 months, and here we wanted to look back on a pretty great year for basketball in 2024. We saw some incredible individual and team performances across the professional, collegiate, and Olympic landscapes.
Men’s and women’s hoops were both as good as ever, and we want to celebrate the best of basketball in 2024 in this space, looking at everything from the best teams and player to the funniest moment of the year before we turn the page to 2025.
Best Team: South Carolina women
There were a ton of really great basketball teams this year — the Boston Celtics, UConn’s men’s team, the USA men’s and women’s Olympic squads. All of them were spectacular to one extent or another, but none of them were able to consistently dominate their competition like Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks, which rode a ferocious defense and a remarkably deep roster to an unblemished, 38-0 record last season and a national title, the first team to run the table and win a national title since UConn in 2015-16. They won all but one of their games in the NCAA Tournament by double-figures. So far this season, they’ve followed that up by winning nine of their first 10 games, with four of those wins coming over opponents ranked in the top-15. Staley has built a juggernaut in Columbia, and we have no reason to think that will stop any time soon.
Best Men’s Player: Nikola Jokic
What’s left to say about Jokic that hasn’t been said already? He somehow keeps getting better, and if not for a team-wide collapse in Game 7 of the Western Conference Semifinals, there’s a chance Denver are back-to-back champions with Jokic winning NBA Finals MVP both times. Even this year, with the Nuggets still trying to consistently find their footing, Jokic has found a way to elevate his game to another level, as he’s averaging a triple-double and leading the Nuggets in points, rebounds, assists, and steals. Oh, and at the Olympics, he carried Serbia to a bronze medal and pushed the United States to the brink in the semis. Appreciate this man for as long as you can.
Best Women’s Player: A’ja Wilson
What a player A’ja Wilson is. The Las Vegas Aces star consistently wins her team games on both ends of the floor, as she’s one of the most unstoppable scorers in the W, rebounds like crazy, and is a nightmare to deal with on defense. Her numbers: 26.9 points, 11.9 rebounds, 2.6 blocks, 1.8 steals per game. Every single one of those were a career-high, which is a hard thing for a player as dominant as Wilson to do, yet she did it, earning her second MVP award and ending as the runner-up for the league’s Defensive Player of the Year. And like Jokic, she was instrumental in her team’s success in Paris, as she led the Americans in points, rebounds, and blocks, while tying for the team lead in steals.
Best Rookie: Caitlin Clark
It says a lot about how good Clark is at basketball that she entered the league with impossibly high expectations for what she would be able to accomplish — both as a basketball player and as one of the up-and-coming faces of the sport — and she managed to live up to them. Despite some early growing pains as she made the always difficult move to the end of the college season to the start of the W campaign, Clark was instrumental in the Fever making the postseason for the first time since 2016, as the team went 20-20. The sky is the limit for what she’s going to achieve in her basketball career.
Best Game: USA men vs. Serbia, Olympic semis
There are some games where you can feel the tension through your television screen, and the Olympic semifinal between the United States and Serbia was just that. It had absolutely everything you want in a sporting event — the stakes were incredibly high, an underdog led by the best player in the world was trying to claim the title of being the world’s best team by knocking off the four-time defending champions, Serbia raced out to a huge lead, the U.S. stormed back and just narrowly knocked them off. The fourth quarter was why I (and maybe even you!) watch sports, and now that I am done writing this section, I’m gonna go watch the YouTube video of Team USA’s fourth quarter run back (which you can also do right here).
Best Moment: Steph Curry closing out USA-France
Having said [gestures at the section above this], the single best moment of the entire year was watching Steph Curry say night night to Victor Wembanyama, Rudy Gobert, and the entire nation of France. We’ve waited so long for Curry to finally wear the red, white, and blue, and while he was great for most of the tournament, the way he closed out the gold medal game by throwing haymaker after haymaker was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen (if you somehow missed it, you can watch here). His Olympic moment was worth the wait, and if that’s the only time he suits up for the U.S. on that stage, he arrived and went out in style by getting the Americans over the finish line in what was essentially a road game.
Best Playoff Series: Liberty vs. Lynx
The 2024 WNBA Finals was absolutely electric, as the New York Liberty edged out the Minnesota Lynx in a 5-game instant classic. It was not the Aces-Liberty rematch most anticipated we’d get in the Finals coming into the season — that, instead, happened in the semifinals — but Minnesota carried the momentum of a tremendous regular season and made for an incredibly stout foe for the Liberty as they sought out the first championship in franchise history. The series had a bit of everything, and was bookended by a pair of stunning comeback wins in overtime, with the Lynx shocking New York in Game 1 by erasing a big deficit to win in OT, while the Liberty flipped the script in Game 5 to win the series. The series featured the stars on both sides showing out, some heroic performances, iconic shots, and a bit of controversy in the way it ended, with the Lynx believing they were robbed by the late game officiating in Game 5.
Best Sneaker: adidas AE1
Anthony Edwards’ first signature shoe with adidas was one of the best sneaker debuts in recent memory, as the Timberwolves star and adidas brought something genuinely unique to the market with a style all its own and one of the best marketing campaigns we’ve seen in years. As a shoe, I’d say the Sabrina 1 is the only recent debuts that hit the market as hot as the AE1 in the last decade — the Kyrie 1 stands out as the best debut prior to those two — and the campaign adidas launched around it felt authentic to Ant and his unique and captivating personality. The sneaker and campaign have been so successful, adidas is sticking with the AE1 for now, and it’s hard to blame them for just rolling out more colorways of the mid and low rather than forcing a second shoe while the first is still hot.
Best Basketball x Music Crossover: DeMar DeRozan and Russell Westbrook getting on stage at The Pop Out
The biggest music story of the summer was Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s feud, and when Lamar took his victory lap at The Pop Out at the Forum in L.A., two of the city’s biggest NBA stars, Russell Westbrook and DeMar DeRozan, were not only on hand to watch (like LeBron James) but up on stage dancing around. It was fitting that at an event where Kendrick seemingly had the whole city out, the two stars that proudly rep their L.A. and Compton roots, respectively, were there with him. DeRozan’s participation — and cameo appearance in the “Not Like Us” video — was particularly painful for Drake given DeRozan spent so much time with the Raptors, and Drake let those hurt feelings spill out when DeRozan returned to Toronto this season, insisting the team shouldn’t consider retiring his jersey.
Funniest Moment: Charles Barkley vs. Galveston, Texas
I honestly can’t think of anything that really comes close here. Charles Barkley has produced some of the funniest sports television moments in his 25 years on TNT, but I think this is on the Mt. Rushmore of Chuck moments. Months later I still, fairly regularly, message one of my friends, “Where they goin’, Chuck?” Everyone plays their roles perfectly here, with Shaq throwing the lob to Chuck, Vince Carter keeping it going by asking if they even get a plane ticket, and Chuck just deadpanning the whole time about that “dirty ass water.” As with all great Chuck bits, by the end Shaq is doubled over and struggling to breathe, while Ernie patiently waits til he’s done and moves the conversation along. This one was so funny and went so viral that Barkley had to apologize to Beyonce’s mother, Tina Knowles — a noted Galveston native — but then proceeded to double down and bring back another of his favorite bits: the big ol’ women of San Antonio.
