NBA & Twitter Sports Team Up With ‘NBA Paint’ Creator For Official Partner Playoffs Project

The mysterious creator behind NBA Paint has become an increasingly influential force amongst Twitter’s #NBATwitter community (and amongst other US sports spaces) with comic game recaps, on-court moment memes and pun-led takes on the league’s key talking points.

It was back in late 2020 that NBA Paint initially drew attention by consistently tagging @TwitterSports in every post and steadily grew in popularity to the point where now players, teams and the league regularly retweet its content. The signature, paired-down style blends knowingly hammy phonetic twists on players’ names with hoops story interpretations and reimagined game highlights.

Since then the account’s increasingly familiar, friendly, cheerful and accessible oblong-bodied players created in the form of pixelated cartoons in crayon-bright primary colours are becoming increasingly familiar and now has more than 50k followers.

“If you look back at the first drawings I’ve ever done in NBA Paint, I was actually using Microsoft Paint browser on Safari on my phone. So I was drawing them all just with my finger on the phone. You can see I’m not really connecting all the lines and they’re coming out really choppy, but that was kind of my initial intention,” explained the creator behind the account. “I feel like everyone past the age of 25 has dabbled in Microsoft Paint at some point when they’ve run out of wifi or internet, or [were] on dial-up and they got kicked off the internet and they either had the option of messing around in Microsoft Paint, or playing that pinball game. So I feel like they get that sense of nostalgia from both of those aspects.”