With the NBA announcing its plans to introduce player nickname jerseys, we here at BiE look at what could happen with Euroleague adopting the same idea.
The NBA is going to have a few match-ups next season where players wear nicknames on their backs instead of their real names. Some are obvious, like King James, The Truth, and AK-47. Others are clever, like Shuttlesworth for Ray Allen. And there will be a few forced ones given players just don’t all have nicknames. For the Plumlees I suggest Not Miles and Not Mason.
As with anything so silly and blatantly rooted in marketing, of course we started thing of how this would work in Euroleague. There are some obvious ones, like La Bomba and DDD. This site loves it some Spanoulis but we’d actually feel guilty putting V-Span on his back. There’s no question the nickname partly exists because English speakers have issues with his name. So Spanoulis gets to pick his own nickname and preferably one that ties the tongues of Anglophones even more.
There’s so much potential here outside of the obvious ones. Bojan Bogdanovic and Bogdan Bogdanovic could easily go with Not Bogdan and Not Bojan but that’s just scratching the surface. These three are our favourites.
Rudy Fernandez – Everybody Hate Me
There would be a queue from Madrid to Moscow of people looking to pick Rudy’s nickname. Most of which would be unusable due to profanity in a multitude of languages. The most disliked man, rationally or otherwise, in basketball definitely merits some attention. Flopasaurus would make sense but is a tad lame. #Heel would go down well with the Twitter kids but we have to go with the XFL inspired option here. Whenever Rudy did anything he could just point to his back and the haterade would flow.
Bo McCalebb – Tecmo
There are few players who can excite the way Bo does. The easy option here is to just put Bo on his back but we’re gonna go retro here and hark to another Bo. There may never be a sports video game character that surpasses Bo Jackson. Great as the real-life Jackson was, Tecmo Bo was on another level.
Joe Ingles – Dangerfield
Ingles is far from the perfect player but the derision he gets isn’t rooted in hatred, it’s in fans believing he just isn’t all that good. In short, Joe Ingles can’t get no respect. He is the Rodney Dangerfield of Euroleague. Plus the name looks far cooler than what it implies.
What nicknames would you like to see on the backs of Europe’s best?
