The Whiteboard: NBA players and their favorite board games

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NBA players, they’re just like us!

That means they’ve spent much of this quarantine period in a desperate battle with anxious boredom, working to keep the walls from closing in. For some, that’s a recipe for Game Night! In a Zoom media availability yesterday, Celtics forward and noted (old-timey) gamer Grant Williams talked about sharing quarantine space with Kemba Walker and trying to coax his teammate to the table:

“The best I could get was Uno and cards. No such things as board games — that’s where we differ. He doesn’t like to sit in places for a long time and I’m just like, ‘yeah, I understand that.’ He’s not sitting for three hours trying play Monopoly, or an hour playing Catan, or Dominion, or whatever it is. He like the quick pace, fast-paced, ‘all right, boom, we won’ or ‘we lost.’ He’s a Trouble board game player. That’s something we did play a lot of, Trouble. It’s kind of funny because that’s the most easiest, simplest game any kid can try, but he loves Trouble.”

The NBA board game community is probably much smaller than the NBA video game community, but it surely exists. Williams’ love of Catan is well documented. Rajon Rondo’s Connect Four skills are the stuff of legends. Jaylen Brown is a noted chess aficionado and Patrick Beverley has been known to crush it on the Monopoly board. Those are the ones we know about but what other games make sense as player favorites?

NBA players love video games, but there is a board “gamer” community too. Today, we’re guessing your favorite player’s favorite game.

Devin Booker — UNO: He wears No. 1. He sheds defenders like unwanted cards. And his step-back 3 has all the back-breaking momentum-shift of an unexpected draw-four.

Robin and Brook Lopez — Shadowrun: There is no way the Lopez twins haven’t played a D&D campaign or two in their day. But drawing their Bucks’ teammates into the world of RPGs could be a challenge and the gritty dystopia of Shadowrun may feel a bit more relatable than knights and swords and goblins. I’m guessing Robin is usually the DM and there is A LOT of arguing.

Chris Paul — Jenga: It’s the ultimate exercise in precision and for the NBA’s most notorious control freak. House rules are that you lose a turn if your jersey isn’t tucked in.

Dwight Howard — Candyland: It just makes him hungry.

Kevin Love — Ticket to Ride: He’s nothing if not loyal. Cleveland is not a part of the board map, but he always builds his routes around Midwest travel hubs, representing flyover country with steely determination.

Kawhi Leonard — Hungry, Hungry, Hippos: No one will play with him anymore because it’s so unfair. With those massive mitts he can control two hippos with one hand.

J.R. Smith — LARP: His entire career has basically been LARPing his way through a campaign set in the world of modern professional basketball.

Jonathan Isaac — Twister: He uses every inch of that 7-foot-1 wingspan to his advantage.

Stephen Curry — Battleship: Something about the aesthetics of just blindly firing up shots and counting on them to go in appeals to him. Also, he’s got a system going where Seth pretends to go to the bathroom, checks out the opponent’s board and then communicates the set-up through a complex set of hand motions. #brothers

James Harden — Agricola: It’s all about resource-management baby. Nothing wasted in a battle of added value and patient attrition.

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