Fictional Hooper Bracket: Hickory Region - Round 2

The stars aligned for Moses Guthrie in the first round, cruising past Mary Camden of 7th Heaven. Air Bud was a very good dog, mauling Big Momma. I thought there would be more of a cult following for Malcolm Turner, but as is often the case when you ask people to vote between a golden retriever in anything, the adorable dog is going to win.

This time around won’t be so easy for Moses because everyone sees Air Bud’s opponent as Norm Snively, the alcoholic clown and original abusive owner of Buddy. However, we’ve seen Dr. J disregard PETA previously when he punched a Bird, so he should have no problem simply dunking on a dog in a game of hoops.

Would Moses flambé Air Bud on the court? Yes. And that should happen here, but the power of the pisces and Mona Mondieu might not be enough to overwhelm the power of a fluffy dog doing something as cute as playing basketball and cheering up a child who lost his dad in a plane crash. (Side note: Plane crashes, dead fathers, and alcoholic, abusive clowns? Jesus, Disney, I thought Air Bud was supposed to be a kids movie.)

So Sandy Lyle has a real cult following. Along Came Polly is far from a basketball movie, but the scene on the playground court is one of the funniest basketball scenes ever written. There’s Sandy’s shot that has the arc and velocity of Russell Westbrook’s, and there’s that sasquatch baller going into zero dark thirty mode halfway through the game by putting on his Moses Malone goggles and taking off his shirt knowing good and well he’s gonna make Reuben eat a much less appealing sandwich — upper body hair, glazed with extra body sweat. Kyle Lee Watson, I mean come on people he played at Georgetown in the mid-1990s. Sandy can use all the euphemisms for rain that he wants, but it’s too hard for him to put a ball in a basket for the thought to cross his mind that he’ll score a point against Watson, but he’s delusionally confident enough to believe he can will himself to victory. Lyle still might win in this bracket, because his trash-talking and over dribbling is adorable. The only way that Watson would play Lyle is for boonks. Watson would torment him, probably even let him call multiple timeouts, all to get to the moment when he can take the ball and give Lyle, “crazy hard, Spalding on yo ass boonks.” That will not go a long way toward Watson winning the popularity contest.

The double-upset game, always a treat when two double-digit seeds get to square off in the tourney. LaSalle pulled off an impressive upset against Cornbread, but he had three advantages in that matchup. One, Cornbread is only in the movie for just over a half hour. Two, Jamaal Wilkes was a terrible actor as Cornbread. And three, the movie is so old that Laurence Fishburne, the grandpa in Blackish, was a middle schooler when he was cast as Wilford. LaSalle will not have those advantages in this round as this 90s star goes up against a 90s superstar in Urkel. When Family Matters was on the air, people literally called the show, Urkel. Combine that with the fact that Urkel is a natural point guard, and the multi-sport star LaSalle better hope an old Recess clip goes viral on TikTok or he’s out of his league here.

The average first-round game received between 300-400 votes, with a few outliers reaching the 600-700 range. The total for the Lola Bunny-Nathan Scott duel was 1,378 votes. That means Lola, who finished with 83 percent of the vote, garnered around 1,100 votes by herself, which is insane. (Also not to be overlooked, One Tree Hill’s Scott came in at about 220 votes, which would’ve been enough to win a few other first-round games.)

Jimmy Chitwood can play a perfect game like he did in the finale of Hoosiers, but if Gene Hackman goes to measure the court in Tuneland, he may find that tactic futile. That said, this is the Hickory Region so technically Chitwood is playing on his homecourt. Caveat to that, these aren’t real games, they’re just Twitter polls, so you get to determine the criteria when you vote.

Depending on who you ask — in this case, 18- to 40-year-olds because they account for 62 percent of Twitter users — each of these movies could be your favorite basketball movie. If this plays out like the first round did, this could be one of the more popular games of the second round… and Lola Bunny will cross Chitwood into oblivion.