Scottie Pippen is selling his NBA legacy again to become the crypto world champion.
In his heyday, the Hall of Famer was happy to be the Robin to Michael Jordan’s Batman. But time, Netflix’s Last Dance documentary and the increasing shame of his public divorce from the ex-girlfriend of Jordan’s eldest son, Marcus, seems to have made him so bitter about playing second fiddle that he apparently started thinking about whether the 1990s dynasty needed the NBA dynasty another hero.
“How many championships would we have won with @ElonMusk? 🤔” Pippen wondered on The responses raised questions among users Scottie Pippen’s state of mind and posting Musk’s difficult podium jumping during a Donald Trump campaign rally as evidence of the X owner’s lack of athleticism. At last check, the post had been viewed more than 27 million times — attention Pippen hoped to draw to his latest project: a new cryptocurrency that attempts to symbolize the basketball the Bulls used to beat the Lakers for the first of their six championships . “I think the game of 5-ball that I have is very recognizable to a certain extent,” he says told TMZ Sports, “and what we’re trying to do is make it a real asset.”
You may have noticed: crypto has taken American sports by storm. Stadiums, jerseys and equipment are covered in logos for various coins or exchanges – few more prominent than the Lakers home, Crypto.com Arena. Many fans use cryptocurrency to place bets and purchase special privileges on their favorite teams. More and more athletes are getting in on the action, promoting the industry as if it were just another shoe or sports drink. When Odell Beckham Jr. signed with the Los Angeles Rams midway through the 2021 season and asked to receive his estimated base salary of $750,000 in crypto, the wide receiver was panned for his dodgy business acumen and then roasted when the market collapsed.
Or maybe Beckham knew what he was doing. Since the presidential election went to Donald Trump, who did not call crypto “a scam” but now promised to make the US “the crypto capital of the planet”, Bitcoin’s valuation has soared to record highs. “Soooo who said taking my Rams salary in bitcoin was stupid again,” delighted Beckham, whose $750,000 would now be worth more than $1.1 million. “I think this is the best thing he could ever do,” said Glauber Contessoto, a popular crypto speculator who goes by the online name SlumDOGE Millionaire. “He takes the money and invests it immediately instead of doing what a lot of these athletes do: blow it and be bankrupt in a few years.”
Dallas Mavericks point guard Spencer Dinwiddie went even further: he turned around himself into a digital asset. He took the $34 million contract he signed with the Brooklyn Nets in 2019 and turned it into a digital government bond. The idea was to raise $13.5 million from investors who put down $150,000 for the promise of regular interest payments and special incentives if he met certain contract bonuses. But then the NBA foiled those plansBelieving they were getting too close to gambling, Dinwiddie limited herself to working with “accredited” investors (read: not Joe Fan) to sell just nine tokens – and because there are currently no exchanges that offer the limited offering for trading offer, the stock is fundamentally worthless.
Therein lies the big problem with crypto: there are no obvious mechanisms by which the average gambler can distinguish serious opportunities from scams. And it doesn’t help that leagues and athletes get caught just as often. Two years ago, cryptocurrency exchange FTX had its name on the Miami Heat’s home arena and Major League Baseball umpires’ uniforms. Tom Brady also praised the platform inside a Super Bowl commercial as part of a crypto advertising blitz. “I’m not an expert, and I don’t need to be,” says Steph Curry his own FTX spot.
At least he was right about the first part. After being named FTX’s global ambassador, Curry released more than 2,900 non-fungible tokens on the platform featuring digital replicas of the shoes he wore while breaking the NBA’s three-point record and donating the proceeds to his Oakland-based non- profit organization spent. Not long after, FTX went bankrupt amid allegations that its owners had embezzled and misused customer money – not least by paying Brady and Curry a combined $90 million for 40 hours of promotional work. according to FTX hagiographer Michael Lewis.
In March, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in the most infamous case of white-collar crime since the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Brady and Curry are now named in a class action lawsuit filed by FTX investors accusing the couple – and other celebrities – of underwriting a multi-billion dollar failure.
The collapse of the FTX is one of the many reasons why Contessoto is urging sports stars to think twice before putting their name to the latest crypto trend. “Nine times out of 10, they are not that familiar with crypto,” said Contessoto, whose story was told in the 2023 documentary This is not financial advice. In the film Contessoto, a Brazilian immigrant looking for a hard graft upgrade and a 200-square-foot apartment gambles his meager savings on a joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. And after winning big in Doge, losing everything and having to build back smarter, he’s especially reluctant to risk his newly earned reputation with memecoins – which is exactly what they sound like: cultural currencies that somehow way becomes reality. Sam Baker, a memecoin trader who also spoke to the Guardian, likens the memecoin rush to “buying a lottery ticket.”
It is a game of chance with exceptionally opaque rules, which could be even more expensive genetically lottery winners with hard-earned reputations like Pippen, who famously undersold his NBA talent before it peaked and spent much of the Bulls’ dynastic run overselling it have to play at a lower price. (He should have bet on himself!) More often than not, Contessoto thinks, “someone is getting closer [these athletes] and says, “Hey, I’ll give you $100,000 if you do this or promote that. Then they launch the coin or whatever and they are carpets and just leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.”
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As a further example, he points to Hailey Welch, aka Hawk Tuah girl, who lent her viral fame to a memecoin and got snookered in it. a classic pump-and-dump grift. And because it’s her face at the $100 million ripoff, the scammers can keep a low profile while Welch takes all the arrows. It’s enough to make you fear poor college athletes eager to trade their fame.
But none of crypto’s inherent risks seem to deter Pippen. That’s despite the fact that they’ve received similar backlash for promoting failed NFTs and struggling to create a market for this new coin – which, again, is based on a ball that no one has thought of in over 30 years. “I think that ball was the start of a dynasty,” Pippen told TMZ. “This ball was something very meaningful to me. Even the moment I picked it up, I knew this would be the start of something special.”
At a crypto conference in New York in October, Pippen expressed his desire to “build a community” around the ball and further develop it into a documentary and a digital game. Michael Saylor, a crypto evangelist who notably labeled the Covid safety measures for his Virginia-based tech company’s employees as “soul stealing,” is one of Pippen’s biggest cheerleaders.
Pippen brushed off the comments on his post from Musk (“I’m following my favorite comments,” he wrote) before showing another AI image of himself and Jordan tipping off against a pair of Tesla robots holding a basketball with his coin symbol on it. “I feel like Scottie’s heart is in the right place,” Contessoto said. “I’m sure he has a lot of people around him who claim to be crypto-savvy. But these guys don’t really care whether the project goes well or not.”
Which is to say: the great Bulls couldn’t be a more perfect champion for major crypto’s sporting campaign, a fresh and freewheeling new era with sellouts like Pippen well on the cusp of taking all the points.