A Review Of The Larry O’Brien Trophy, Or Anyway A Larry O’Brien Trophy

Imagine how good it would feel to pluck the regulation-size basketball off the top of the Larry O’Brien trophy and get some shots up. Sure, you’d need to adjust your jump shot to account for its construction—sterling silver with a 24-karat gold vermeil—and you’d need a brave rebounder. I suppose you wouldn’t be doing much “off the dribble.” But when presented with such an exquisite basketball, one simply has to line up the seams and let it fly. That temptation was top of mind Monday as I examined the NBA championship trophy at the American Museum of Natural History, where it was unveiled as part of the ongoing exhibit “For the Win: Objects of Sports Excellence.”

The trophy was actually bound for the Manhattan museum no matter who won it in June. As museum president Sean Decatur said at its unveiling, they had already been in talks with the NBA for months, and it was agreed that it’d be loaned out after the season. Only by happy coincidence was it won by a team that plays about 50 city blocks away, minimizing any carbon footprint. Essentially, its journey has been a little longer than that of a David Roth cardboard cutout, I thought. Unlike the Stanley Cup, the NBA commissions a new trophy each year so the winning franchise can keep theirs forever. Decatur told me that the trophy was a less demanding houseguest than the World Cup trophy, which the museum held for only six hours just before the start of the tournament, and had more extensive security and logistical needs.

As a Knicks fan, I haven’t had many previous occasions to think that hard about this trophy or study its appearance. Listed at 25.5 inches and approximately 30 pounds, it is typically held by enormous people who make it look comparatively small, so I hadn’t realized that the basketball was regulation size. It was only when I came within arm’s length of it that I noticed, for the first time, the column supporting the ball is not just a column but is actually patterned on one side like a net. In the old version of the trophy, that pattern was more abstract, but after a 2022 redesign it has rendered the net cord much more faithfully. At the base of the trophy are two discs, with engraved names of every past champion since 1947. The top disc has 75 team names, and the bottom disc was designed to accommodate 25 more, so the NBA can make it to its centennial before refreshing the discs. From what I could tell, “SEA SUPERSONICS” eats up the most real estate of any champion, so a revival of that franchise followed by a dynasty could potentially force a trophy refresh even sooner. I’m pulling for them.