Both Turner and Lively started building Lego in their spare time precisely because their careers afforded them so much of it.
“NBA teams don’t hold practice as much as they used to,” Sam Amick, a senior NBA writer for The Athletic, explained in a phone interview. “Even for someone with the work ethic of a legendary, Kobe Bryant type, even on days when you put in multiple workouts, you have a lot of downtime. Then you add in the road trips, when downtime is going to come inside a hotel room… It’s tough.”
Turner, whose parents forbade him from playing video games as a kid, was an avid Lego enthusiast growing up but moved on from it sometime in his adolescence. Then he went pro.
“I was just so bored. I was 18, 19 years old, in a new city with nothing to do,” he recalls. Like Wembanyama, he splurged on Lego during his rookie season (“splurge” being relative when you sign a multiyear contract reportedly worth eight figures) and never stopped. Last season, his ninth in the league, he assembled 18 builds, totaling 52,999 pieces—all of them accounted for in a TikTok vid, natch.
“When I’m here in Indy, that’s pretty much how I spend a lot of my time,” he explains. “I put some music on, or a film or whatever show I’m watching, and I spend a lot of my days just pretty obsessed. I actually build more Lego in-season than I do off-season.” (This past off-season, though, his girlfriend surprised him with a trip to Brickworld Chicago, the world’s largest Lego convention. As Turner does with many of his builds, he documented the “mind-blowing” experience on TikTok.)
Lively likewise got back into the Lego he loved as a kid—probably not coincidentally, he never liked video games—while nursing a rookie-year injury in 2024. “I wasn’t doing much, and my mom gave me the Home Alone set,” he explains. “All the windows and doors and walls open up, and even the roof—it got me intrigued, like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know Lego had this kind of detail.’” (The 3,955-piece build also includes a boxed Little Nero’s pizza, a Michael Jordan cutout atop a model train, and a zipline to Kevin’s treehouse out back.) “Usually on my downtime, my number-one priority is to eat, and then comes Lego,” he adds.
Other priorities, however, can change. Scheduling details such as departure times for team flights can undergo last-minute adjustments. Lego is a diversion that’s relatively easy to put down and come back to—or, depending on the size of the build, to pack and take on the go.
“When on planes, we do Legos,” Gafford, Lively’s teammate, once wrote in a social media post showing off a car and a Batman figure he’d put together atop his seatback tray. Lively replied, “YESSIR LOVE TO SEE IT.”
Daniel Gafford and Dereck Lively II are professional LEGO builders 😂🔥 pic.twitter.com/cJQkczsO4n
— MFFL NATION (@NationMffl) June 27, 2024
Lively calls such creations, like his recently constructed 784-piece Lego Christmas tree and the 317-piece, Lunar New Year–inspired Lucky Knots set, his “filler” builds. They’re better suited (although still not ideal) for plane travel, or he’ll tackle a few as palate cleansers between bigger builds. On the afternoon we spoke, he told me he’d completed a motorcycle and a dinosaur egg that day, and then started a Poke Ball.
But he has found that assembling sets with larger piece counts on an unpredictable schedule can still be rewarding because of the way Lego organizes all those pieces inside the box. The bricks necessary for complex builds with multiple components are grouped into smaller, sequentially numbered bags. (The company claims it’s making those bags more sustainable.) In effect, this makes the building process less like wading through an ocean of jigsaw-puzzle pieces and more like progressing through chapters of a novel.
“It comes down to how many bags are in a set,” Lively explains. “If I have nothing to do, I try to get through as many bags as I can, to the point where my hands start to get a little cramped. But if I know I’ve got two, two and a half hours, you can look at how many bags are in a set and pick, like, when’s my stopping point.”
Bigger builds may scratch an itch for another reason: They’re not just a way to fill or kill time, but also a way to clock small wins—for the UConn athletes, they’re almost like signposts on the road to the Final Four.
“The basketball season is so long,” Bueckers told me in a joint interview with El Alfy. “You’re working the entire season for success at the end. With Lego, you see the hard work—whether it’s a big piece or a little piece that you can finish in an hour or a day. You see all your hard work come to fruition in a Lego set, and it’s just super fun.”
