Culture
Marjanović intentionally misses free throw, gets Clippers fans free chicken
The final day of the 2023-24 regular season saw several playoff teams jockeying for seeding, other teams trying to improve draft lottery odds and a few just hoping to end the campaign on a high note.
The Houston Rockets, who had made an unsuccessful late charge for the Play-In Tournament, fell into the latter category, looking for their first non-losing record since the 2019-20 season.
As it turned out Sunday, the Rockets and Los Angeles Clippers fans both took home a win.
With 4 minutes, 44 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of Houston’s eventual 116-105 victory over the Clippers, center Boban Marjanović missed his first free throw. Marjanović — a career 76.4 percent free-throw shooter — then purposefully missed the second to win fans in attendance free chicken.
The Clippers organization runs a promo in which attending fans get free chicken if the opposition misses two consecutive free throws in the fourth quarter. So the Clippers faithful, who had seen its backups fight admirably all game, finally had something to cheer about, prompting the rising crescendo.
Boban.
Man of the people. 🍗 pic.twitter.com/PRq6xIXxIW
— NBA (@NBA) April 15, 2024
Rewarding home fans when two consecutive fourth-quarter free throws are missed has grown in popularity in recent years. In some blowouts when the end-of-bench players finally take the floor, some players miss the first free throw, getting the crowd riled up, only to make the second and mock them.
But if there was anyone in the NBA who would purposely miss to ensure that fans would go home with a reward, it would be Marjanović, who is arguably the nicest professional basketball player on the planet.
A finalist for this season’s NBA’s sportsmanship award, the former Clippers fan favorite has made a career of kindhearted gestures at his various stops around the league.
As soon as the second free throw rolled off the side of the rim, Marjanović raised one finger in the air, reminding the ongoers whom to thank for the free Chick-fil-A.
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(Photo: Adam Pantozzi / Getty Images)
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. With ancient Greek texts back in the cultural conversation — thanks to the new film based on Homer’s “Odyssey” — this week’s challenge highlights screen adaptations of other Greek plays, poems and histories. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. Scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the works and their screen versions.
Homer’s “Odyssey” has been translated into English countless times, with versions ranging from contemporary and accessible to highly poetic. A.O. Scott, critic at large for The New York Times Book Review, breaks down three translations and explains which one might be right for you.
Among the many complaints made about the modern American novelist, the loudest, if not the most intelligent, has been the charge that he is not speaking for his country. A few seasons back an editorial in Life magazine asked grandly, “Who speaks for America today?” and was not able to conclude that our novelists, or at least our most gifted ones, did.
This opening paragraph is from an essay titled “The Fiction Writer and His Country” by a writer whose work was influenced by Catholicism, the rural South and peacocks. Who was it?
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