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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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, ‘The Grizzlies don’t have any championships.’ And I love that. It sounds dumb saying it aloud. But, if I could go support a team, and I feel like I’m part of the bigger of their history when they’re winning, then that would definitely feel good.”
Since 2020, there have been plenty of highs and plenty of lows. The Grizzlies made the playoffs four times in five years. They saw Ja Morant, Jaren Jackson Jr, and Desmond Bane all become stars. In that span, Zinzy estimates that he’s watched more than 70% of Grizzlies games.
But, the 2025-2026 season was a tough one. They traded away Bane in the offseason, and Jackson Jr ahead of the midseason trade deadline. Now, it appears like it could be the end of the road for Morant, too, with trade rumors circling the point guard all season.
Advertisement
So, on the heels of a such a difficult season and the fanbase in flux, Zinzy viewed the gimmick as something silly that could bring the fanbase together.
The 2026 Warriors-Grizzlies playoff series began one night in a dorm room
One night, while studying for his final exams at the University of Manitoba in Canada, where he was studying environmental design, he randomly began to live-tweet a fake series between the Grizzlies and the Warriors.
“I just got this idea, like – I can still do this on my own,” Zinzy said. “I can do it on Twitter, right? So I just, I tweeted fake stats of Ja and Steph in a Game 1 battle. Then right after that, a couple of days later, I decided to fake live-tweet Game 2 out of nowhere.”
Advertisement
He didn’t think much of it at first.
But, slowly but surely, other major fan accounts on NBA Twitter decided to get in on the bit. It helped that several Warriors fan accounts with big-time followings, like @WarriorsMuse and @BasketballPerformances, also jumped in and partook in the fictional series joke.
The whole thing really blew up on Monday night, when Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr were actually sitting courtside at an Orlando Magic playoff game to support their old Grizzlies teammate, Desmond Bane.
The broadcast kept panning over to Morant and Jackson Jr each time they celebrated a Bane triple, and eventually, fans flocked to social media to post photos of Morant and Jackson Jr, jokingly writing captions along the lines of: “What are they doing?? They have a game tomorrow!”
“I just seen my timeline talking about, ‘Don’t they have a game?’” Zinzy said. “And I was like, ‘This is crazy. Like, why do so many people get the reference?’
Advertisement
Since that night, even official accounts like Overtime have gotten in on the joke. Zinzy has aligned the schedule of his fake Warriors-Grizzlies series with the ongoing Houston Rockets series against the Los Angeles Lakers series. He’s also gained more than 4,000 followers since the gimmick began almost two weeks ago.
Above all, the joke has brought a joy and a levity after what was a difficult season for diehard Memphis fans.
“I watched every game that I could,” he said. “And it’s crazy, because some of them, we were tanking… And I’ve tried, believe me, I’ve tried to detach myself from this team. I mean, the team is so bad. I say it all the the time I could be doing plenty of other things with my time — and then I would still come home, put up my TV, sit down for two, two and a half hours, and watch us lose by thirty.”
Advertisement
He’s enjoying seeing that the joke he began in his dorm room just a few weeks ago has brought laughter to so many Grizzlies fan. The fanbase has provided him with an immense sense of community as he moved from Nigeria to Canada for college a few years ago. He used to livestream games with several other Grizzlies fan accounts, and today, he’s in several different groupchats with thousands of other fans.
“We don’t just interact on the timeline,” Zinzy said. “We actually join groups, join DMs, we talk about other things outside of sports, talk about life. It’s just a really nice community. They don’t judge.
He’s never actually made it to Memphis, but that’s a dream he hopes to see realized sooner rather than later.
“The fanbase has been one of the best groups of people I’ve ever met – in real life, Twitter, TikTok, it’s great people everywhere.”
Advertisement
But until then?
Zinzy is preparing for a crucial Game 6 between the Grizzlies and Warriors, which tips off on Friday.
Read the full article here
