If you guessed Michael Beasley as the “NBA Player most likely to hallucinate and see gremlins on the rim during an NBA game,” then congrats you are correct! From NBA.com:
Michael Beasley will not let free throw gremlins win without a fight
Michael Beasley’s free throw routine involves scaring away gremlins. But of course it does.
Mark J. Rebilas-US PRESSWIRE
Suns forward Michael Beasley, after missing two of his first free-throw attempts off the side of the rim, walked down the lane, stared up at the iron and shook his head. “I had to scare the gremlins away,” he said. “Those gremlins are always messing with me.”
See it’s something like this that reminds you we can never have enough Michael Beasley news in our lives. Unfortunately, Beasley isn’t actually hallucinating. In a post over at Yahoo!, Kelly Dwyer did some research and found this, quoting an old report from Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Well, here’s the story:
“That’s a college job,” said Beasley, who played one season at Kansas State. “Luis Colon was my college center. He’s a big Spanish guy and when big Spanish guys get mad, they start speaking Spanish real fast. Every time he missed, he’d look at the rim and curse the rim out. So every time I miss, I’m trying to get the gremlin off the top of the rim.”
Again, it’s a bummer that Michael Beasley is imitating an old teammate’s superstition and isn’t hallucinating during NBA basketball games every night, and furthermore, it’s a shame he’s not cursing out the rim in Spanish every night, because that’d be pretty perfect too. But even if he’s not cursing out inanimate objects and/or hallucinating, that second explanation never really explains where the “gremlins on the rim” came from, so this is still sufficiently insane if you ask me. We can’t be too greedy with this stuff.
(God bless the NBA.)
