A fake playoff series is taking over the NBA world — how did this start?

When the NBA playoffs began earlier this month, 19-year-old Zinzy was disappointed that the Memphis Grizzlies, his favorite team, weren’t in the mix.

The Grizzlies were fresh off a 25-game, rebuilding season and were on the outside looking in for the first time in years.

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So, he had a goofy idea — what if he jokingly live-tweeted a fake playoff series, as a gimmick?

At first, he was planning on doing so with a good friend who was a Phoenix Suns fan, who was worried that his team might miss the playoffs, too.

“We were talking, and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be so funny if you got knocked out, if you didn’t qualify for the playoffs, and we just did this fake playoff series in our heads?’” Zinny told SB Nation. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, that would be cool.’ And then, they made the playoffs eventually, and I was just like, that kind of sucks.”

But, after thinking about it a little bit more, Zinzy decided to do it anyways. In part, because it’d be funny. And, in part, because it was something to bring together a community that had long meant so much to him.

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The rest was history — since his first Warriors-Grizzlies Tweets on April 18th, tens of thousands of NBA fans have posted Tweets and ashared Instagram posts reacting to an NBA playoff series that isn’t actually taking place.

How the heck did we get here?

The story actually begins six years ago, in Nigeria

In 2020, Zinzy was a 13-year-old living in Nigeria who had never even taking a liking to basketball.

“I was very ignorant of the sport, right?” he recalled. “I was like, basketball is boring.”

Then, one night, a friend of his dragged him to watch a Grizzlies game on television at 2am. Almost immediately, he found himself enthralled, drawn to the Grizzlies’s bright-blue uniforms and captivated by rising superstar, Ja Morant.

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After doing his homework, he learned that the franchise that had never won an NBA title, and had not had a ton of success relative to other teams. And, in a funny way, that made him want to become a Grizzlies fan even more.

“I did some research on all the teams. And I was like,…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/fake-playoff-series-taking-over-182359055.html

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Publish date : 2026-04-30 18:23:00

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