Splash, reversed waterfall, draining threes: What is it about water and basketball?

The Splash Brother got his captain’s salute. But water is all over basketball, not just in the Bay.

When Klay Thompson returned to Golden State this week as the Dallas Mavericks faced the Golden State Warriors for the first time this season, Klay was received with a “Captain Klay” salute and captain hats to everyone in attendance. It brought to mind Klay Thompson’s love of the ocean, clips of him swimming in the Bay to “get right” and video of him on his boat, sailing to practice, joyful and almost giddy.

But when it comes to the game of basketball, Klay Thompson is not the only nautical feature. It turns out that this sport seems to be almost overflowing with water lingo.

Tuesday in his return to the Bay, Klay Thompson couldn’t hide that he was touched as hundreds of Warrior employees welcomed him back with cheers and captain’s hats. After leaving the organization to try and get a fresh start in Dallas after 13 years in the Bay Area, Klay smiled and raised his fist in a memorable celebration of his incredible career in the Bay Area.

Back during the summer, Klay had invited some of his new teammates out on his boat in California, using some downtime as a bonding experience. New teammate, Quentin Grimes, shared this clip of Klay Thompson jumping off a boat into the ocean. A group of Mavs players were reportedly in LA for workouts at the time.

“Can’t have a bad day going to work via the ocean,” he said in 2022. And as it turns out, water is Klay’s happy place.

“I make it a point to jump in the ocean… I’m an Aquarius so I just have always loved the water my whole life, it really is my happy place besides the hardwood,” he said.

While water is Klay Thompson’s refuge, it’s also a favorite idiom and metaphor for shooting the basketball, as well as a list of other things. Not only was Klay Thompson part of the Splash Brothers in Golden State, he also describes his shot – or shooting technique – as The reverse waterfall.

And that got me thinking: What is it with basketball and water?

Because as I started researching and asking NBA experts and people well-versed in NBA history, the list of water metaphors to describe basketball and used as plain basketball terms just grew longer. Turns out, the more you think about it, the more water-related basketball terms come up.

No one seemed to really know where it came from, but most seemed amazed at the fact that water is used to describe so many things. Here are some of them:

Splash
Splash brothers
Draining threes
Raining threes
Reversed waterfall
The wave
Dribble
Scoring and playoff droughts
Scoring in spurts
Flooding the zone or paint
A flush
A floater
Flow
Being wet (draining threes)
When it rains, it pours (shooting streak)

The Splash Brothers nickname, however, does have an origin story that fits perfectly, which is probably the reason it persevered over time. It refers to the duo of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors and their elite ability to shoot and “splash” three pointers.

But it’s also a play on an older nickname for another pair of San Francisco Bay Area teammates, baseball players Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, who were known as the Bash Brothers when they played for the Oakland Athletics in the 1980’s.

The nickname was phrased back in 2012 in a tweet from Brian Witt, a writer for the Warriors website, according to the origin story. “On December 21 against the Charlotte Bobcats, Curry and Thompson had combined for 25 points and seven three pointers by halftime, when Witt posted an update of their performance on the team’s Twitter account with a #SplashBrothers hashtag; Golden State would win the game 115–100. The Warriors liked the nickname, and encouraged Witt to continue tweeting it.”

The connection between Klay Thompson’s affection for water and his affinity for making three pointers is probably more poetic to the outside observer than to him. But the link is right there in our faces, whether it’s conscious or unconscious.

At some point, people decided to start using water in different forms to describe the game of basketball, and both media, journalists and players followed suit.

The best reason I am aware of is that the game of basketball seems to relate best to the poetic fluidity of water. The shooting into a bucket, the draining of threes, the floaters and flushes (into a bucket again, now it becomes less poetic), the splashing, the dribbling, the droughts.

All of this point to a poetic connection, which players, announcers and writers have found appropriate over time when describing the fluid, shift shaping game of basketball, and its almost mythical shooting of a ball from a very far distance into a small bucket.

Water in its many forms, however, is used quite often in folklore, religion and as metaphors in art. A tsunami has many meanings, as do riptide, storms at sea or while anchored at the harbor.

And famously, martial artist and actor Bruce Lee said 1971: “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Basketball in its essence is about adapting and adjusting. To new players, coaches, teams – but also to what the defense throws at you. To have success in basketball, you don’t want to be rigid, you want to flow like water. This description fits a player like Shai Gilgous-Alexander perfectly, who seems to be able to slither through the gaps of defenses with ease.

Water is the ultimate example of adapting to your surroundings, of going with the flow. Something you could argue is needed when you’re trying to hit a small bucket 30 feet away. But the bucket can also “look like the ocean” when you’re on a shooting hot streak.

Whether Klay Thompson has a poetic side and is attracted to water not only because he is an Aquarius and likes swimming, the fact remains that the happy place of one of the best three point shooters of all time is the water.

The connection is almost too flashy, too bright and in your eyes to be poetic. But for some reason, it still manages to overcome the obvious and transform into poetry anyway.

The water-loving Splash Brother Captain Klay goes to landlocked Dallas to get a fresh start. Will he find water in the desert or will a drought slow him down? We’ll see this season, and in the meantime, we may find a new use for the word poetic justice.

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