Why Does This NBA Player Wear His Headband Around His Neck?

Headband. Head. Band. It’s right there in the name. These are bands to be worn on your head. But Jalen Suggs, the 24-year-old Orlando Magic point guard, can’t be constrained by traditional logic like that. Suggs is an out-of-the-box thinker, you see. Rather than playing basketball with his headband on his head (rote, predictable, done thousands of times already), for the past few games he’s been sporting it around his neck (awesome, out of nowhere, makes you wonder if it’s an accident).

Fernando Medina/Getty Images

Suggs hasn’t been doing the throat band for entire games, however, probably due to the fact that it would be really uncomfortable to do so. There’s a reason no one in the NBA dribbles up the court in a turtleneck, after all. Instead, Suggs will start the first quarter with the band snugly around his Adam’s apple, and then slide it up to his forehead after a few minutes.

“It’s funny. I don’t even know [if] there’s an explanation for it,” Suggs told Jason Beede, beat reporter for the Orlando Sentinel. “Really it originates as football drip, that’s where it stems from. But I don’t know, there really isn’t much else to it. I wear it on my neck, and once I feel into the game, into the flow, I put it on my head and we rock.”

Rock on! Whatever the reason, the oddball accessory seems to be working: Suggs, whose Magic got over .500 with a convincing win over the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday, has been hooping. In each of his last six games—four of which have been Orlando victories—Suggs has registered double-digit points. Across those half dozen games, he’s averaging 14.5 points, 5.0 assists, and 1.5 steals per game, while making exactly half of his shots. Unfortunately, even with the statistical revolution that’s taken over the NBA, we don’t have any metrics for how Suggs performs with the headband around his neck vs. on his dome. We do have video evidence of him scoring at least two points at Madison Square Garden with this unusual garb, though.