5 best NBA Christmas moments ever

4. Dwyane Wade (2006 vs. Los Angeles Lakers)

It’s a silly quotable at this point: “Get you a man who can…” The joke is usually the language used, but the joke in this case is that there is no man who can do what Dwyane Wade does. There’s no way to get you a man who can match Dwyane Wade’s Third Noel, in which he nearly tallied a snowflake-like 5×5 game.

Instead, he merely tallied 40 points, 11 assists, and 4 each of rebounds, steals, and blocks. That’s a 37.0% usage rate, if you’re keeping track at home, on a team featuring Antoine Walker. A team that was also following up on its 2006 NBA Championship, and facing a formidable opponent in the Los Angeles Lakers during Kobe Bryant’s second-best season. 2006 was right around the time that Wade-Bryant was the premier guard matchup in the entire NBA, and Wade made that intrigue look silly on Christmas, with a whole nation of basketball fans watching closely.

He smothered Bryant into 16 points on 4-17 in a signature “More Points Than Shots” performance, and the Lakers lost by double digits. With no one but Bryant’s buddy Ronny Turiaf scoring more than 10 points, this probably counts as the worst basketball game on this list, but that’s to Wade’s advantage if we’re ranking individual performances. He dominated this one so thoroughly on both ends that the competitiveness of the game disintegrated into a cloud of Wade.

Just as efficient (12-20 from the field, 15-16 from the line) as all the others here, this one should probably be higher. Peak Wade was so great.