With the 28th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Griffen Eckstein selects... EXHILARATION

I’ve had the exhilarating and unsettling feeling of Griffen climbing inside my brain to illustrate with precision, care and astonishing accuracy the strangest things I’ve written for five years. It started with The Classical (RIP). I wrote NBA fanfic in general (Paul Pierce is a vampire who misses the team bus and has to fly as a bat to a game in Sacramento from L.A., Chuck Hayes gets lost in a chuckwagon in the wilds of Texas and is accosted by Matt Barnes and the Plumlees as outlaws) and then later as annual Halloween stories (Phil Jackson takes apart the bodies of superstars to create his own horrific Dunkenstein), and Griffen gamely brought each one to life. But please make no mistake, he is a talented artist first, illustrator of weird NBA stories second.

There are people I’ve met through basketball I still gawp over knowing. Whether singularly talented, generous, funny or just really rare gems, people that I’ve been lucky to chance into my orbit via something as simple and grifterly (for me) feeling as a game we both love, and Griffen is all of the above. He took breathless moments for his pick, EXHILARATION, and skewered them on pen point, rendering them simultaneously fleeting and stark, memory moving like a carousel slide projector.