In 1994, Scottie Pippen did one of the coolest basketball things ever. He was under his own team’s hoop, and had to inbound the ball. Danny Ainge was in front of him, but he wasn’t facing Pippen; why, Ainge, deduced, would he have to? The inbounder can’t shoot—only someone who caught his pass was a scoring threat. But that’s when the cool thing happened. Pippen gently tossed the ball off of Ainge’s back, walked onto the court to grab it, took one dribble, and got an easy dunk.
It couldn’t have been the first time someone did that in a professional game, but it was one of the most infamous; a key text in the genre of the maneuver, and an enlightening moment for the many millions of people who saw the play and didn’t previously realize that you could, in fact, do that. On offense, or on defense, it is technically permissible to throw the ball off of opponents who are unaware or otherwise incapable of stopping you from using them as a backstop. And many incredible plays have been born from this interesting crease in the rulebook: one of my favorites was three seasons ago, when Jrue Holiday threw the ball off Marcus Smart in an especially pressurized, momentous, and odd-angled postseason moment.
Perhaps it is moments like Pippen’s and Holiday’s that Desmond Bane has in mind when he throws the ball off of opponents. But here is where the word “technically” becomes key. Bane executes the maneuver as if this interesting page in the NBA officiating manual is to be understood as a free-for-all loophole; yes, he says with his increasingly aggressive tosses, I have found it: the one way I can do this, throw it as hard as I want to. My malice, and their harm, are in this instance allowed.
Bane is wrong, of course, and in a way that anyone with eyes can see. You don’t need to know the rules to watch how he’s throwing the ball off of guys and see that it’s inappropriate. First he was defending Onyeka Okongwu in a road game against the Atlanta Hawks, last month. He was a step behind the fast break, and Okongwu rose up on him. That’s when Bane pulled him down by the arm, and as the ball fell, he completed its descent by swatting it upon Okwongu’s shoulder. He was ejected.
Then he did it again on Sunday. It was another fastbreak, and O.G. Anunoby stumbled past the out-of-bounds line after Jalen Suggs and Anthony Black met him at the rim. Bane saw another opportunity: he grabbed the ball, and—rather than sending it the other way, to start a Magic counter-attack—he wound it back like an Olympic handball striker, hurling it full-force into the fallen Anunoby. Bane got a technical, this time, not a full ejection, but the repeat instance has got a lot of people asking the question of what exactly in the hell is wrong with him.
It’s what Anunoby seemed to be wondering, looking more baffled than angry as he shoved Bane in the most minimal, perfunctory way after having the ball chucked at him. Tyrese Maxey and Cade Cunningham haven’t had the ball shot at them, but they could probably share in Anunoby’s puzzlement about Bane’s hostility. Bane recently hovered menacingly over Maxey after fouling him to the floor, and went out of his way to bump meanly into Cunningham during a dead-ball moment in another Fall contest. In his first year with the Orlando Magic, Bane’s strange behavior is sending alarming ripples through the Eastern Conference.
If you’ve followed the team he came from—the Memphis Grizzlies—for the past several years, perhaps none of this is surprising. Memphis has had a rambunctious, norm-breaking bunch, with no one on those squads more typifying this sort of chicanery than former Grizzlies stalwart Dillon Brooks, who has since brought his brand of aggro-ball to the Houston Rockets and Phoenix Suns. Brooks’ shenanigans can escalate, at times, to a level of distraction, but every team who’s had him has been glad for his consistent leveling up of the shared standard of intensity.
Perhaps that’s what Bane’s going for in his new home. He may believe that what Orlando needs is a bit more Memphis in its spit. At the moment, this campaign looks more ridiculous and concerning than impressively defiant, though. Rather than being the man who brings the fire, he appears to be one who can’t gracefully handle it, and is lashing out at oddly low-stakes moments during games. Four first-round draft picks were given up for Bane, a guard who the Magic viewed as the final piece to a championship contending team, but one that has started 2025-26 looking like just the same middling Eastern Conference playoff roster they were before acquiring him. If you were the center of such a mismatch of hope and reality, you might want to throw stuff at people too.
