Jared McCain Plus Philly Sports Fans: It's Gonna Be Fascinating
The combination of a nail-painting, TikTok-singing-and-dancing rookie with long-suffering Sixers fans could be a combustible one. But it could also end up being pretty fun and cool for everyone.
As someone who stopped even doing the most perfunctory amount of prospect scouting a half-decade ago, I was zero percent familiar with the great majority of players in this NBA draft class. But I knew Jared McCain.
Partly that's because he was one of the handful of prospects of note this year who was actually coming off a college season of consequence, playing on a good Duke team that made the Elite Eight and (by most accounts) becoming their best player by season's end. But mostly, that's because of Aimee Carty, the 20-year-old Irish singer-songwriter behind the lightly viral alt-pop hit "2 Days Into College." What does she have to do with Jared McCain, you might wonder (especially if 80% of your day job isn't geared around researching unexpectedly surging pop songs and the driving forces behind their success)? Well, it was McCain's TikTok posts about "College," singing and dancing along to the song and its various remixes, which lit the fuse on the song's online explosion.
I've seen a decent number of songs get a bump from college sports before -- but usually when I do, it's because an entire team (or even more often, multiple teams across multiple sports) has adopted a banger like Lil Baby's "Low Down" or Sexyy Red's "SkeeYee" as their locker-room anthem or whatever. Most individual college basketball players don't have that kind of influence -- and if they did, they certainly wouldn't use it on a quirky, neurotic piano romp like "2 Days Into College." But when you have a magnetic personality, open ears and an open mind about pop music, and (most importantly) three million TikTok followers, your signal boost tends to be a little more meaningful than that of the average amateur athlete.
McCain recreated one of his "2 Days" singalongs on Friday at the Sixers' Camden practice facility for the team's social media accounts, which they shared with the caption "two days into Philly." (The fact that no further context was apparently needed or warranted for the clip should give you a sense of how much McCain's posting speaks for itself among the younger generation.) The reactions from Sixers fans were typically split, between the replies fawning over "his AURA" and those claiming to already be done with his overall extra-ness. But the comments I found most telling were the handful that essentially said, "I hope for his sake that the kid can actually play."
I can't wait to see how this relationship unfolds. It's gonna be wild.
It's not like Sixers fans have never dealt with cute before, exactly. McCain may not even be the cutest guy in the Sixers' backcourt next season, as Tyrese Maxey has had that status on lock since he was still just a gleam in Mike Muscala's eye, and if you wanna take it from him you'll have to get through a couple million Delco moms first. And it's not like we haven't even had to deal with the combination of cute and precocious before, as rookie Matisse Thybulle's YouTube vlog briefly made him the toast of the Sixers internet, before his lack of shooting permanently lowered his adorability ceiling.
But we've never quite had a Jared McCain before. We've never had a player not just this wholesome, this sweet and this extra, but this seemingly self-assured in his sweet, extra wholesomeness. We've never had a player appear this comfortable with nontraditional forms of masculinity, with his predilection for painting his nails and ensuing NIL deal from polish brand Sally Hansen even resulting in his drafting (and the response to it) being covered by sites like Outsports. I don't know or assume a damn thing about McCain's sexuality or sexual identity, but the fact that he's made singing a female-penned song about being on and off with a guy named Colin a big part of his public brand certainly suggests he's less scared by the prospect of courting discussion around those topics than most past Sixers (or male professional athletes of any sport or geography) would have been.
I've already seen many folks on Twitter jump to the conclusion that McCain is gonna catch hell here, particularly from the old-school Sixers fan contingent, both for his lack of adherence to strict gender norms and for his embrace of social media stardom. Maybe. Obviously, there's nothing Real Fans hate more than the feeling that players are more concerned with anything than winning, and in truth, having any obvious interests outside of basketball can be bad news for a Philly athlete. So if McCain struggles, the fact that he'll probably still be promoting his nail polish and dancing to the latest viral sounds on TikTok while doing so will make him a pretty easy target. And there will likely be some degree of unpleasant culture war stuff mixed into the nastiest bits of commentary -- either implicitly or explicitly anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black and/or anti-Gen Z rhetoric that's going to make everyone uncomfortable.
But will it be the prevailing fan sentiment about McCain, or even the voice of a particularly notable (and loud) minority? I'm not so sure. I've also seen suggestion related to McCain that the Phillies -- these Phillies, our Phillies -- and the way they've been embraced by the entire city is a good sign that Philly fans are more willing to accept athletes of a less traditionally macho variety than we might realize. No doubt the Phillies have embraced a level of physical and emotional intimacy with one another that would've heretofore been largely unimaginable in Philly sports, which (along with their decidedly left-of-center taste in jock jams) has helped to earn the team a sizable and devoted LGBTQ following. They're still clearly a bunch of bros, which undoubtedly helps make them an easier sell to some of the more conservative pockets of the fanbase, and their roster skews old enough that they don't really end up stoking a lot of generational debates. But it's not all that difficult to imagine McCain enjoying a victory beer (or at least a victory root beer) with Schwarb and Casty and screaming along to Dua Lipa or Bossman Dlow with the rest of the Phillies locker room.
It should also make it easier for McCain that, like these Phillies, he is by all accounts a winner. While some may hear reports of his social media phenomenon-ness and NIL beauty deals and assume that makes him an airhead and a clout chaser, all the expert testimony about him at Duke and about him as a prospect is that he's a grinder, a scrapper, a hard worker and a positive locker-room presence, and someone who rises to the occasion in big moments. Nobody ever got mad at Tyrese Maxey for having a smile that could light up this whole town because it was clear almost immediately that he was a killer on the court and a gym rat and film sponge off of it, and it seems like the same will likely be true of McCain. (The two of them together might be too much infectious energy for one locker room to properly handle; maybe we'll even see Joel Embiid smile once or twice before January this year as a result.)
Of course, it's probably worth noting that all of this could be very easily and very quickly be proven moot anyway. Spike mentioned on the post-draft pod with The Danny (hell yeah Dan!!) that a likely large part of the calculus that went into Daryl Morey's selection of McCain was that he would be appealing to other teams in potential trades. And as a hard-working, well-liked young prospect with NBA-level shooting that will likely play immediately, I do think he will be a very attractive mid-season piece to a lot of GMs out there. It's entirely possible that the entire city of Philadelphia falls in love with McCain early this season, or even this summer, and that he's traded roughly 10 minutes later. (Not totally unlike my darling Landry Shamet a half-decade ago, though hopefully the player we'd get back in such a deal would have a little better and easier go of it in his stead than Tobias Harris.)
And maybe McCain flops here. Maybe he struggles early, fans turn on him, and we end up seeing an uglier side of the Process Faithful than we really have in the last 10 years. I don't know how it's going to go, really. But I think I'm more optimistic than not that it's going to end up being a fit. More than gritty or even blue collar, it's realness that Philly demands of its athletes -- and I think that regardless of the way it's presented, the real is gonna show through with McCain, and his seemingly unshakeable sense of self is gonna prove intoxicating. I'm so excited to see the fan sections that spring up of kids and their parents painting their nails along with whatever style McCain's most recently embraced. And I definitely hope to be writing about him both for the Ricky and for Billboard for a long time to come.
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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Great article. I love the kid, he's a breath of fresh air and totally captivating. I just hope he reads the room and chills out a bit when we do lose, though he seems switched on enough that it won't be a problem!