An Unexpected Highlight of the NBA Return Is the Big, Dumb Virtual Fan Video Board

From Esquire

The Boston Celtics’s Jayson Tatum is lining up to shoot a free throw. It’s the second night of the NBA restart, which kicked off last Thursday in Orlando. The camera zooms in to the left side of Tatum’s face, but not too close—you can still see what’s behind him. If you’ve watched a game in this brave new era of hoops, you already know the backdrop: A floor-length, 17-foot-tall video screen, stuffed with fans who video-called in to see the action.

Behind Tatum, though? One fan sticks out. Not a person, though. It’s a dog. A white labrador. In a gray seat. Patiently waiting, like a good boy, for the basketball man to shoot his shot.

Now, this is small stuff compared to, you know, keeping hundreds of players, coaches, and personnel healthy—but the whole no-fans-in-the stands thing has been one of the thousand-odd questions heading into the return of sports. Several soccer leagues have chosen to pump artificial crowd noise into its broadcasts. FOX’s MLB presentation has toyed around with CGI fans. The NBA? You can apply to be a “virtual fan,” where, through the power of Microsoft Teams (Zoom must’ve lost out on that bidding war), you can beam yourself into a seat on the mammoth LED screen and be watched by millions.

Don’t get me wrong. The end result—the Zoom call of your nightmares, what must be 50-some strangers of varying sizes and video quality—is horrifying. But the video board is so damn weird that it might’ve just made the introduction of virtual fans one of the best parts of Bubble NBA.

The NBA has always stood out for its small oddities—James Harden and Russell Westbrook dancing together pregame, truly absurd halftime shows, officially associating itself with its video-game counterpart and spinning it into its own league. The video board fits right in. You start looking for weird shit going on in the pixelated crowd—a people-watching experiment you could otherwise only really do at IRL games. It kind of becomes a hoops-themed game of “Where’s Waldo?”

Squint real hard, and you’ll spot one of the former NBA stars who have already proved their virtual fandom, like Chris Bosh or Paul Pierce. Maybe you’ll see a superfan or two, sprawled out in all their gear. Children, dogs, all are welcome. The virtual fans can (and do) leave their seats if their team is in the middle of a blowout. That’s fun to watch. Aside from all that: With a seat at a Warriors game going for hundreds of dollars anymore, it’s awesome that any fan, theoretically, can snag a seat at an NBA game, even if it’s not in real life. It's free to apply for a seat, although being a season ticket holder might get you closer to the front of the line.

Oh, and for the record: This operation definitely has its flaws. Its perspective skews a little Alice in Wonderland—brace yourself for a giant baby bouncing around next to a tiny, adult man in a LeBron jersey. Sure, grainy apparitions of fans looming over a professional basketball game is a little distracting, too. (But look at the doggo!) Plus, there’s no doubt that someone will inevitably do something so abhorrent during an ABC broadcast that it’ll ruin the fun for everyone.

I, for one, welcome the inevitable milestones that will come with virtual fandom. Who will be the first virtual fan to have one Bud too many, and start stumbling and yelling and glitching across the video board? Or what about the first virtual fan kiss cam moment? (Followed by a virtual proposal?) If we’re lucky, two rivaling fans will have a virtual fight, slapping the air in each others’ virtual vicinity. One can only hope.

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