Above: Oregon junior Dillon “LOL” Brooks reacts to, I don’t know, maybe getting hit in the thigh a little by a Utah player’s arm by hopping backwards and then jumping explosively off one leg onto the ground as if he’d just been shot by a cannonball.
It’s bad, but is it really—as the author of that tweet and other observers have claimed—the worst flop in basketball history?
No. It can’t be the worst flop in basketball history, for one, because Brooks and the Utah player actually did make contact. Watch here as Tony Allen reacts to not being elbowed in the face by falling backwards and lying on the ground for several seconds in apparent agony:
Here’s another great example of that genre executed by Chris Bosh:
Chris Paul surpasses both of them by flopping away from the ball off of “contact” from a player who didn’t even realize that Paul was there:
Regardless, basketballers are way, way behind soccer players when it comes to this stuff, soccer having a much richer tradition of embellishment or, to use the technical term, “simulation.” For one, soccer flop artists know that the part of your body that you clutch in agony doesn’t actually have to be related to the part that actually made contact with another player:
Brooks also could have taken a lesson from this Brazilian gentleman, who waits until he’s already on the ground to do an impression of having been murdered by a live power line, giving his flop significantly more visual pop and adding meaningfully to its total duration:
Also, this, from a 2005 German game, is just very funny.
In any event, nothing will top the Chilean goalkeeper who was banned from international soccer for life after being caught cutting his own forehead open with a razor blade in a scheme to frame Brazilian fans for attacking him with fireworks. Now that’s a flop.
