NBA Nicknames Are Getting Out of Control

Think of the most iconic nicknames in NBA history. Whether it’s Pistol Pete Maravich, Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon, or Air Jordan, the very best hooper sobriquets all possess a distinct throwback flair. It’s not hard to imagine an old-timey radio broadcaster reading them in that transatlantic accent that nobody really has anymore. Even some of the canonical modern NBA nicknames (King James, The Joker, The Greek Freak) feel very last-century-coded.

For the most part, though, when current players receive nicknames, they almost always lack the creativity of their forefathers—either it’s just their initials (KD, SGA, AD) or a shortened version of their name (Ant, Book, Wemby).

Or that was the case, anyway, until a recent trend swept through the NBA like a midseason plague. In the place of newspaper columnists or local broadcasters, a new class of NBA nicknames are being coined by young, extremely online, gambling-addicted fans. And if you’re aware of this trend at all, it’s probably because of Jayson Tatum.

At some point this season, devoted Tatum fans decided that the Celtics star needed a nickname. They landed on…The Anomaly, a nod to Tatum’s unique skill set. It immediately took off online, eventually winding up canonized on his Basketball Reference page. And yet Tatum, understandably, isn’t all that sure about the moniker himself. During a recent press conference, the 27-year-old responded to a question about The Anomaly by swerving to some other nicknames: namely “Big Deuce” and “Taco.”

The potential for bathroom humor aside, Big Deuce only really works as a nickname with the context that Tatum’s son is named Jayson Jr.—a.k.a. Deuce. Taco, meanwhile, sounds too much like something your friends might call you during a recess pickup game. Getting 30 dropped on you by a guy named Taco is fine on the playground, not so much during the Eastern Conference Finals. As such, we’re probably stuck with The Anomaly. Because of the way the world works now, full of irony and increasingly devoid of earnestness, expect NBA fans to refer to Tatum as The Anomaly for the foreseeable future.

But the real story here is the countless offshoots The Anomaly has inspired. In the span of a few days, NBA Twitter ran wild bestowing Anomaly-style nicknames to a wide range of players, often with absurd and hilarious results. Let’s run through some of them here, starting with a few that could be conceivably embraced by the players themselves.

Cade Cunningham: The Paradox

A couple of days ago, the popular TikTok account House of Highlights posted a video of Cunningham spinning to the basket with overlaid text that read “The Paradox with a tuff bucket,” accompanied by a flame emoji and the one where the guy is blowing steam out of his nose. That is, at its core, the whole point of these nicknames. If you can’t picture it being used by an aggregator account with that exact emoji combo, go back to the drawing board. It also helps that paradox is an incredibly fun word to say.