Media day is always an exciting one around the NBA, as it marks the beginning of the new season and all 30 teams feel a wave of optimism about what is to come.
How quickly that feeling of optimism dissipates varies from team to team, but it is always fun seeing players mostly in a good mood and ready to get the season underway. The teams take advantage of that excitement and players being in good spirits to put them through their paces in front of the camera, knocking out most all of the photo shoots and in-arena entertainment videos for the upcoming year. For star players, that means a particularly large workload in front of the camera and as media day has become a bigger operation, teams have started doing more than just having players do stuff in front of a green screen.
In Atlanta, they want to quite literally get fired up for the season and had Trae Young and others shoot some photos and video in front of pyrotechnics, and poor Trae was not prepared for how aggressive the flames would be.
Trae thought it was over with
pic.twitter.com/5lxYdoYUjZ
— Atlanta Hawks (@ATLHawks) October 2, 2023
I want to know what Trae was told was going to happen and what he was expecting here, because it clearly wasn’t giant columns of fire shooting off behind him. As someone who used to work concert security and would occasionally end up closer to the pyro than I wanted to be, I can respect this reaction because those things are jarringly hot. Maybe next time they should at least show the guys what the pyro is going to do before the first shot.