Now *that's* how you celebrate a title
This summer, party like a Panther
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re talking about having a good time.
There’s something sterile about a modern championship locker room. The beer cans and champagne bottle angled for maximum sponsor exposure. The branded goggles. The sheets of plastic protecting luxury stalls.
Celebration scenes used to cap each season—regardless of sport—offering indelible images that came to represent entire eras. But somehow we’ve gone from this…
…to this:
"That was the most tempered locker room I've seen after any championship,” reporter Marcus Thompson said from the scene.
“New generation of athletes have lost the love of the sport,” one fan responded online. “At this point it's just an end of the year business party.”
A tempered parade followed days later. If the Thunder are going to become a Gen Z dynasty, they better learn how to celebrate like one. Fortunately, they have some peers to learn from. The NHL’s Florida Panthers and WNBA’s Indiana Fever both knew how to put on a show during their after-party.
The Panthers took the celebration to Miami nightclub E11EVEN, racking up a $500,000 tab, denting Lord Stanley, and trash-talking the rest of the league. That’s exactly how you act when you’ve been there before.
“We get to enjoy it a little more because we know the feeling already a little bit,” team captain Aleksander Barkov said later. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s still amazing, but now everyone just knows how to sit back a little bit and enjoy it because last year was so hectic. It happened to you for the first time ever, and you’ve been dreaming about it for such a long time, and I feel like this year, everyone gave permission to themselves to enjoy it.”
Days later the Fever—celebrating a WNBA in-season tourney victory, and the $30k per player that came with it—understood the content-creation assignment, putting out a livestream-of-consciousness that included twerking, well wishes for Red Panda, and shots at WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert.
“There’s CC (Caitlin Clark) in there biting all the bottles for everybody, biting through cans and sh-t,” veteran Syd Colson said.1 “It was fun.”
I’m ready to accept that the best postgame moments won’t appear on TV, but instead play out on player-hosted livestreams and captured glimpses from bystanders posted to social media. Magical images have been replaced by hilarious memes. That’s fine.
Watch too much sports these days, and you can feel the life getting sucked out of events as financial influences grow and grow. I was worried celebrations might be ruined forever. But two teams just doused me with optimism.
Now, who’s got a can to bite into?
Eben’s ⚡ Take:
I don’t think it’s necessarily a coincidence that the NBA’s youngest title-winning team in 50 years also produced its tamest celebration.
But on a more serious note, the Panthers’ raucous, multi-country Stanley Cup party was just another example of how much fun that locker room seems to have. And this offseason, facing a salary cap challenge, the team managed to re-sign its three biggest free agents at below-market rates. All of them have emphasized how much they enjoy playing for the Panthers.
The Thunder also seem poised for a potential dynastic run over the next half decade. At some point, that might rely on some players deciding they love playing in Oklahoma City so much that they’re willing to take less money. For Thunder fans’ sake, I hope that locker room is more fun than they let on last month.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
She also credited the team’s “party schools” education for the postgame atmosphere, so there’s one benefit of forcing athletes to stay in college for three years before going pro…