With the NBA playoffs underway, a season’s worth of storylines are coming to a head. Can the Warriors finish off one of the greatest campaigns in league history? Is there anyone in the Western Conference who can slow the team’s ascent to the pantheon? Will LeBron James and the Cavs gel enough to pose a threat to whoever does come out of the West? But while all that is shaking out on the court, one of the season’s most bizarre and fascinating narratives is unfolding on Twitter.
Since the end of March, a Japanese NBA fan using the Twitter handle @7A_NBA has posted a series of cartoons portraying the whimsical domestic adventures of Oklahoma City Thunder stars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. In the colorful and undeniably adorable drawings, KD acts as the caretaker to a pint-sized Russ in an internet-era update of the old Odd Couple formula, browsing the aisles of their local market, trying on their Sunday best, and enjoying a cozy bedtime story.
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The Sanrio-esque art could not be further from the hyper-masculine world of the NBA, but to Nanae, the artist behind the account, that’s the point. Her drawings portray the league as she sees it, and in the case of Westbrook and Durant, this meant showing how they complement one another. “I thought that the best way to express Russ and KD’s relationship (two superstars that may clash at times but wouldn’t dissolve their relationship) was a mother and her son,” she said during a recent email exchange. To her, Durant is the “mother that watches over [Westbrook], calm and grounded.”
Nanae, who asked not to be identified by her full name, says she is a 41-year-old housewife from Saitama prefecture who fell in love with the NBA during the 2011-12 Finals. The emotionally fraught series, in which the James-led Miami Heat beat a very young Thunder team in five games, got her hooked on the sport, and laid the groundwork for her fandom.
“I love how there’s so much drama packaged into a game—the development of players, team chemistry as a result of conflict and friendship, the awe of witnessing will power in physical form, seeing the desire to win expressed through a single play,” she said. “For me it’s not just a game. I’m addicted to watching to see what the next drama will be.”
Durant is the “mother that watches over [Westbrook], calm and grounded.” Drawing by Nanae
While basketball’s popularity may lag behind sports like baseball, sumo wrestling, and soccer in Japan, Nanae has been able to connect with other fans online. “Japanese NBA fans have found each other through Twitter and other social media, and I feel like we’ve created a kind of community,” she said. Since she lives just outside Tokyo, she’ll sometimes journey into the city to meet up with fellow aficionados for viewing parties. But since the games are usually on TV during the morning and early afternoon, she normally watches at home via NBA League Pass on Apple TV or her iPad.
Earlier this season, Nanae’s fandom started to evolve. While she had been following and posting about the sport for some time, it wasn’t until late last year that she began drawing pictures of her favorite players and posting them to Twitter and her own website. Despite the quality of her drawings—in addition to her more cartoonish works, she’s also drawn a number of realistic portraits of stars like Kawhi Leonard, Boban Marjanović, and Steph Curry—she claims to have had no formal training, aside from a couple classes in college. But she has not let this stop her from trying to portray the inner spirit that drives her favorite players.
“When I see a player and am really intrigued by how they play, it makes me want to draw them,” she said. “Sometimes you can tell the personality of a player by the way they play, and when I see that it intrigues me. Not the play itself, but I want to draw the face that that player is making when their personality is expressed through a play.”
For Nanae, there is no better muse than Westbrook, a player she was exposed to during that first Finals series. “In that series Westbrook was playing so hard that it almost seemed reckless, but he was also the embodiment of his will to win, and it captured me,” she said. “I think Russ is a risk taker. He would probably go all in at a table and take that risk, and if he lost everything as a result he’d probably be fine with it, and I love that about him.”
This understanding and heartfelt empathy for Westbrook has led her to portray him in a more impressionistic manner than his peers. When he first started popping up alongside Durant on her feed, he was drawn as a cat due to an early nickname that never caught on; over time he’s evolved into a young boy bouncing between being an infant and a kindergartner.
“I love him like a son!” Nanae, who has a real 10-year-old boy of her own, said. “Russ was already an All-Star when I started watching him but he was so rough around the edges and inconsistent. Compared to KD he had zero stability. But ever since I saw him, I was intrigued by this diamond in the rough rather than the polished diamond at the center of the tiara (KD).”
While it’s clear to any of her followers where Nanae’s heart lies, she admits that she doesn’t believe this is the Thunder’s year. “GSW,” she said when asked who she thinks will win it all, but that prediction comes with a caveat: “I’m superstitious about these things so I never really say what I really want or don’t want to happen.”
*Translation help provided by Nage at bballmuse.com.
