10 Unforgettable NBA Media Day Quotes, Moments and Antics

A handful of media days are already done, but the bulk of the NBA scheduled their 2024-25 introductions for Monday.

As teams reconvene this fall, we're sure to see some antics from some of the league's most colorful characters, but it'll be tough to top some of our favorite moments from the last several years.

Below are some of the best, funniest and most memorable moments and antics from NBA media days gone by.

For most of his career, Kawhi Leonard has been something of a mystery.

He's rarely sought out the cameras or attention that goes beyond the court.

And that was especially true after a 2017-18 campaign in which he played just nine games for the San Antonio Spurs.

The following offseason, he was traded to the Toronto Raptors.

And at his first media day outside San Antonio, the world saw a side of him that took the internet by storm.

After describing himself as a "fun guy" and realizing he had no idea where a question came from, he let out his now infamous cackle.

Months later, Leonard and the Raptors won a title together, and somehow this might still be his most memorable moment with the organization.

After a 2021-22 Brooklyn Nets campaign packed with turmoil , Kevin Durant reportedly told ownership to either trade him or fire coach Steve Nash and general manager Sean Marks.

It's tough to come back from that.

And the Nets, of course, didn't.

Nash was fired in November 2022.

KD was traded to the Phoenix Suns three months later.

Somehow, Marks remains, and he was present for a doozy of a quote from Nash a few weeks before his exit.

After being asked about moving forward as coach after the star player asks for his ouster, Nash said: "Families go through things like this.

You go through adversity.

You go through disagreements." And then, apparently, in Brooklyn's case, you implode.

The video above is amazing, but it might be just as fun to read this exchange between the one and only Michael Beasley and ESPN's Dave McMenamin.

DM: With taking it a day at a time, where should this Lakers team end up by the end of the year? Beasley: Exactly where we want to.

DM: Which is? Beasley: Where we wanna be.

DM: Well, where do you want to be? Beasley: Taking it a day at a time.

DM: But if, once you add up all those days, where can you end up? Beasley: The future.

DM: Fair.

McMenamin then asked what the ceiling was for that year's Los Angeles Lakers and finally got an answer longer than a second or two, but it really didn't forecast much about the upcoming season.

Suffice to say, Beasley didn't consider himself a stat-chaser.

The NBA has given us plenty of surly, funny or otherwise amusing exchanges between players and media, and this one was an all-timer.

For those who got to know Steven Adams as a freshman at Pittsburgh and rookie for the Oklahoma City Thunder, he was a mostly clean-cut , tattooless and relatively quiet big man.

But at OKC's 2014 media day, just ahead of his second NBA campaign, he debuted a stache, identified the mustachioed Tom Selleck as his idol and put his appearance on an evolutionary path the likes of which we've rarely seen in the NBA.

Adams now has tribal tattoos covering his right arm, hair that's grown past his shoulders, and he is typically rocking a full beard and looks as much like a live-action Aquaman as he does an NBA player.

In 2018, for the second time in his career, the greatest player in franchise history and perhaps the most famous player of all time, left the Cleveland Cavaliers.

This time, Channing Frye was all over the opportunity to snatch LeBron James' old locker.

And he had some fun describing the switch.

When Kevin Love asked whose spot Frye took, he simply responded, "some dude." There's no video necessary on this one.

A picture does the trick.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has one of the longest names in NBA history, and that's with just four letters in the first one.

If you count the hyphen, there are 18 more in his last name, and that's an awful lot to squeeze onto the back of a single jersey.

At his first NBA media day for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2018, the text stretched from about one elbow to the other and may have taken some getting used to for fans who were just emerging from an era with names such as Paul, Griffin and Jordan embroidered on the back of L.A.

jerseys.

New hairstyles, facial hair, tattoos or some other distinguishing feature are often all the rage at media days.

And in 2014, the Washington Wizards were introduced along with some dueling mohawks.

Center Marcin Gortat showed up with sort of a Mr.

T or late-stage Undertaker look that was cropped close to the head.

Martell Webster went a different way, with a mohawk that rose five or six inches into the air.

"It's two different genres of 'hawks here," Webster told reporters that day.

"He's in the 'Mo' phase.

I'm in the 'Fro' phase.

He just started.

He's a novice.

Give him some time, it'll come around." There's not much to say here beyond the quote itself from Enes Freedom.

Coming off a 2017-18 campaign in which he averaged a double-double but failed to make the playoffs with the New York Knicks, he noted his desire to get back to the game's biggest stage and, I guess, noted something else along the way.

"I've been in the playoffs before," he told the media.

"That should be everybody's goal.

When I think about playoffs, my nipples get hard.

I'm sorry." Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for Knicks' jerseys), Freedom never played a postseason game for New York.

Anything that generates a GIF or meme that's still in regular use over a decade later deserves a mention here.

And Monta Ellis' now infamous run-in with a computer on media day did exactly that.

The clip itself includes Ellis carefully plucking away at a keyboard and explaining why he's out on social media, but the lasting image (typically in GIF form), shows him rubbing his hands together, shrugging and seemingly ready to drop some digital heat on someone.

One year after rocking some unexpected dreadlocks that went halfway down his back, Jimmy Butler debuted his emo alter ego in 2023, complete with piercings and an eye-covering, sweeping hairdo.

Given the lack of appearances from either look in actual games, it's safe to assume he is mostly trolling his with season-long headshots that show up everywhere from ESPN to Basketball Reference to everywhere in between.

Whatever the motivation, we're here for it.

Media days have gotten pretty monotonous.

Just last week, Nikola Jokic said , "I don't know why we're doing it every year." Players might as well have some fun with it, and Butler clearly is..

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