It's Fucking Coffee

We thought stories about mundane things “taking over” locker rooms couldn’t have survived beyond Bleacher Report’s breathless story about how NBA players were obsessed with drinking water, but a contender for worst entry into the genre has emerged, courtesy of food-related schlongformer extraordinaire, ESPN’s Baxter Holmes. The premise of his latest story is that the Portland Trail Blazers have come up with brilliant way to help their players fight the sleepies: giving them coffee.

No, really, that’s the whole story. The Portland Trail Blazers drink coffee, and that’s... somehow remarkable. It’s quite a long story, too, which is perhaps less shocking once you see the writerly lengths Holmes went to in order to describe a simple process that millions of people complete every morning:

It’s time to make the coffee.

Back in a hallway, in a jet-black carry-on padded suitcase, the necessaries are retrieved: coffee beans from Water Avenue (a Portland roaster), electric grinder, electric kettle, two stainless-steel 16-ounce French press coffeemakers, and powdered, organic, coconut-based “superfood” creamer. And then, in a cramped room adjoining the visitors locker room, Forcier and fellow Trail Blazers sports performance specialist Ben Kenyon get to work, in tandem — grinding the beans, boiling the water, adding one cup of grounds to the press, letting it brew for two minutes, then stirring, pressing the plunger down and adding the creamer — a five-minute process that they have perfected for the past four seasons.

Yep, that’s how you make coffee.

So how does the league’s most exhausted team fight back? By turning to the same fuel that millions call upon every sunrise. It might feel antiquated, an age in which players invest vast sums in chefs, nutritionists and dieticians to fine-tune and amplify performance. But for several players, the answer to their problems is simply a cup of joe.

Yeah, it’s coffee.