Inside the NBA’s hand care obsession

KARL-ANTHONY TOWNS strides up the sideline, heading for the scorer’s table. Tipoff is almost here at Madison Square Garden as his Knicks host the Bucks on this late November night. The lineups have been announced, the anthem has been sung, and the teams have finished huddling. All that is left is for Towns and the other starters to perform their final acts of preparation.

At the edge of the table, Towns grabs a shaker bottle with a red label and a perforated lid. He turns it over and sprinkles white rosin powder onto the table’s surface. He smears his hands in the small pile before clapping them together. Then, the big man hits the court.

As Towns jogs off, his teammate Jalen Brunson replaces him at the table. The team captain reaches for a lime-green, puck-shaped jar. Pressing a pointer finger into the open jar, Brunson scrapes a dollop of white hand cream and transfers it to his other palm. He repeats this action, rubs his hands together and joins Towns on the floor.

Now in his 10th NBA season, Towns adopted the ritual early in his career, drawing inspiration from the habits of two legends. “I saw LeBron doing it, I saw KG doing it, so I wanted my moment to use powder,” he tells me. It eventually became an integral part of his routine, evidenced by his reaction ahead of his Knicks preseason debut on Oct. 6, following a blockbuster trade from the Timberwolves, when he couldn’t find the red bottle.

“I actually got mad,” Towns admits. “I almost damn near flipped the scorer’s table.”

Towns makes trips to the scorer’s table for rosin re-ups at the start of quarters, at the end of timeouts, after video reviews and pretty much whenever he is returning to the action. Sometimes, if the supply runs dry, he pauses to pour more powder onto the table. But Towns often just taps his hands into the existing pile while walking past.

His teammate, Brunson, isn’t shy about heading back for additional dips into his trusty jar before reentering the action. “It’s usually the first time I go in the game, then depending on how I feel, I’ll add a little,” he says. The only thing that has changed since the seven-year pro began consistently putting on the cream as a rookie is the amount he applies.

“Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it’s a must,” Brunson says. “I always do it.”

THE NBA’S MOST FAMOUS PLAYER showcases the league’s best-known example of sideline skin care before every Lakers game, when LeBron James snatches a shaker bottle and heaves a dusty cloud into the air. But across the league, players are dabbing, smearing, dousing and lathering their hands at the scorer’s table as they head onto the court.

The official NBA rulebook forbids the on-court use of any foreign substance “designed or intended to provide … a competitive advantage.” However, according to league memos, explicit exemptions are allowed for three categories: “Rosin Powder,” “Chalk or Liquid Chalk” and “Hand Lotion (for hand maintenance).”

It’s tough to know exactly who uses which substances, and how often. No stats are recorded for finger-dunks per 48 minutes. No metric exists for rub-ins above replacement. However, all 30 NBA teams consistently stock the same two products on the sides of the scorer’s table: the red-bottled Mueller rosin blend powder and the lime-green jars and tubes of O’Keeffe’s Working Hands hand cream. Most clubs put out just one form of the latter — a jar or tube — on a game-by-game basis, but at least eight teams offer both for players to choose between swabbing and squeezing.

In addition to James, known hand powder aficionados include the Warriors’ Draymond Green, the Spurs’ Chris Paul, the Nuggets’ Russell Westbrook, the 76ers’ Kyle Lowry and Caleb Martin, and the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown and Jrue Holiday. Portions of the black scorer’s tables in Cleveland and Brooklyn, among other arenas, resemble smudged classroom chalkboards thanks to the permanent rosin blend stains. Brunson must be wary of Towns’ handiwork whenever the guard customarily hops atop the Knicks’ end of the table during stoppages to wait for play to resume.

“I try not to sit on the powder side, because then you look crazy,” Brunson says.

Presumably, the table in Toronto has become better moisturized since the Raptors traded for Immanuel Quickley last season, given the guard’s tendency to drizzle globs of Working Hands from the tube, straight onto the table’s surface, like a beachgoer applying sunscreen. He is one of many documented hand cream users, along with the Warriors’ Steph Curry, the Cavs’ Donovan Mitchell, the Bucks’ Damian Lillard and the Heat’s Bam Adebayo. Ditto for the Hawks’ Dyson Daniels: Before a mid-February road game in New York, the league’s steals leader snatched a couple of scoops of cream as he took the court for warmups. Meanwhile, at the Timberwolves’ practice facility, fellow players know instantly when guard Mike Conley hoists a shot.

“Someone will rebound it and it’ll be all lotion-y and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, Mike must’ve just touched this,'” Conley says.

A few mad scientists, including the Sixers’ Kelly Oubre Jr. and the Magic’s Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, sometimes even mix the powder and the cream. “It’s a good combo,” Oubre says. Even fewer players swear by a third product, Mission Power Grip, a liquid chalk that comes in gray tubes the size of travel hand sanitizer bottles. “That’s always been my thing,” the Hawks’ Onyeka Okongwu says.

But most players remain loyal to either Mueller or O’Keeffe’s, with rivalries sometimes forming on the same roster. Rudy Gobert and Jaden McDaniels roll with Team Powder in Minnesota, for instance, while Conley and Naz Reid rep Team Cream. And while Hart joins Brunson in scooping from the green jar before every Knicks game, fellow starter OG Anunoby follows Towns’ lead in patting the pile.

“I’ve experimented with Working Hands,” Towns says. “It’s cool, I like it, I see why people use it. It’s hard, though. I’ve built a habit of using scorer’s table powder. So that’s the way I go.”

Swipe by swipe, shake by shake, a decades-long tradition of sideline skin care has exploded into a leaguewide obsession. One fumbled pass or one errant dribble can cause a team to lose its grasp of a possession, a game, or a series. And yet, in an age when nothing goes in or on their bodies without scrutiny, countless players rely on products commonly found at hardware stores and pharmacies for the last, most important thing they do before returning to the court.

“It’s always been an NBA thing, I guess,” Oubre says. “You just see people going to the scorer’s table, checking into games, doing stuff with their hands.”

EXACTLY HOW THE NBA developed its dermatological habit is unclear, as historical evidence is sparse. According to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the lone relevant artifact in the museum’s collection is a bottle of baby powder from a medical bag once carried by former Celtics trainer Ed Lacerte, who was with the team from 1987 to 2017.

There is no question that players were coating their hands with foreign substances long before Lacerte first worked an NBA sideline: Several peers of three-time league champion Paul Silas recall the late forward using a Stickum-like paste to help snare rebounds in the ’60s and ’70s. “If he touched you, it would stick to the hair on your arms,” says Hall of Fame forward Bobby Jones, who played with Silas on the Nuggets. (Per league memos, there are four explicitly banned products: Mueller’s Stickum, Mueller’s Quick Drying Adherent spray, Cramer’s Tuf-Skin spray and Cramer’s Firm Grip powder.)

But it was around the start of Lacerte’s tenure that rosin powder first became a fixture atop scorers’ tables leaguewide. One of the earliest examples available on Getty Images, from 1990, shows Michael Jordan leaping over a white shaker bottle of Cramer’s Rosin Mixture while reentering play in a Bulls game against the Pistons, having chased a loose ball out of bounds.

Founded in 1918 by two Kansas-based brothers, Chuck and Frank Cramer, both of whom were later inducted into the National Athletic Trainers’ Association Hall of Fame, the eponymous sports medicine company spent years as the only player in the NBA powder game. Its bottles even made annual courtside cameos at the All-Star Game throughout the late ’90s and ’00s.

The early 2010s saw a challenger emerge in Mission Power Grip, thanks to the fact that NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony helped develop, test and talk up the gray-tubed liquid chalk. “Sweaty hands can mean all the difference with a shot, a pass, a block and, most importantly, your confidence,” Anthony said in a news release around Power Grip’s 2011 launch. “The chalk is messy, and is really just for show…”

A changing of the rosin guard was also underway then, as Cramer, which was acquired by Performance Health in 2013, lost its hold on the NBA market in favor of Mueller’s red bottles. A family-owned sports medicine company from Wisconsin that has been around since 1959, Mueller also makes a chalk-only athletic powder that has a small amount of traction in the league today.

It was also around this time that the now-omnipresent green jars and tubes first appeared, marking the start of a rise to their contents becoming arguably today’s preeminent choice for basketball players seeking midgame hand maintenance. As the Lakers’ Dorian Finney-Smith says, “It just seemed like it grew gradually. Now everybody’s dipping their fingers in that jawn.”

Working Hands cream was invented in 1990 by Oregon pharmacist Tara O’Keeffe, who whipped up the formula in her kitchen to combat the cracked skin that her father endured at his job as a rancher. Now owned by Gorilla Glue, O’Keeffe’s primarily markets its signature product to farmers, doctors and others who use their hands for a living. Among them is the brother of the Nets’ Cameron Johnson, a neuroscience lab employee whose work involves operating on rats.

“When his hands get dry, instead of putting on lotion, he uses Working Hands so he’s not slippery,” Johnson says, going on to recount a moment of mutual surprise one day when the brothers each pulled out their own jar. “He was like, ‘Why do you have this?’ And I was like, ‘Why do you have this?'”

As for how the cream became such an NBA staple, the answer appears to be almost entirely through word of mouth. Finney-Smith learned about it after spying a jar in Seth Curry’s gym bag when they played together in Dallas. The Hawks’ Clint Capela and the Heat’s Kyle Anderson similarly report being introduced to it by former teammates Gerald Green (in Phoenix) and Boris Diaw (in San Antonio), respectively.

“My dad played, so he used it,” says the Jazz’s KJ Martin, son of former NBA forward Kenyon Martin, whose career ended in 2015. “He always told me, if your s— dry, use this.'”

Photo archives point to the Thunder as the likely patient zero among NBA clubs, with green jars popping up on the Oklahoma City side of scorers’ tables as early as the 2012-13 season. But while further reporting efforts to unscrew the lid on the cream’s exact entry point into the league were unsuccessful, its dominance today cannot be denied.

“Every team uses it,” Grizzlies guard Luke Kennard says. “I’d say like half of our team uses it. And the coaches are all over it, too.”

ISAAC OKORO EXPECTED to face the usual rookie learning curves when the Cavaliers forward entered the NBA in 2020, such as adapting to the pace of the professional game. But he didn’t anticipate struggling to grasp one of the sport’s most basic tasks: Time and again, a Cleveland teammate would throw a pass only for it to slip through Okoro’s hands. “I really had to adjust to the NBA basketball,” he says.

It’s a common challenge for incoming hoopers accustomed to synthetically grippier hardware at the NCAA level or overseas, where composite leather balls are the norm. In comparison, the NBA’s official all-leather models, sourced from Horween Leather Company and manufactured by Wilson Sporting Goods, can feel downright slick if the player’s hands don’t have enough moisture to maintain surface tension with the cowhide.

A decent sweat can do the trick here, especially with more worn-in basketballs. But often outside help is required. Fortunately for Okoro, a solution was hiding in plain sight atop the Cavaliers’ side of the scorer’s table. “I used to be like, ‘What is this green thing? Why’s everyone putting it on before the game?'” Okoro says. “Once I started putting it on, I was handling the ball better, catching the ball better.”

It doesn’t take much cream to make a difference. “A little finger swipe,” Conley says. “I don’t, like, go in there and dip it out.” But the results can be game-changing: Both Conley and the Grizzlies’ Kennard testify that they cannot normally palm an NBA ball without first grabbing a green jar or tube. “There’s no better ball than a worn-in NBA ball with the Working Hands,” Denver’s Christian Braun says. “It’s optimal. The ball doesn’t even feel normal without it.”

Users say that whereas the glycerin-heavy Working Hands hydrates dry palms and fingers without leaving behind the greasy feeling of more water-based lotions — Mueller’s blend of magnesium carbonate chalk and rock rosin addresses the opposite problem. “I think the powder’s good, because it dries up your hands,” the Cavaliers’ Tristan Thompson says. “The cream? I think it’s a little more sticky. I like my s— dry. Catch that ball nice and rough and firm.”

Regardless of what side of the Team Cream vs. Team Powder rivalry one is on, both substances serve the same overall purpose: helping players touch up the one part of their body that touches the basketball. “Making sure you take care of your hands isn’t something people think about too much,” says the Magic’s Gary Harris, another Working Hands devotee. “But it’s definitely an important part because everything we do is with our hands.

Certain factors can influence the amount of either cream or powder that a player puts on at any given moment, and when. The state of the ball is one. Climate is another. “If we’re playing somewhere warm and humid like Miami, I use less,” Conley says of his cream habits. “In Minnesota, Utah, Denver, Toronto — places where it can get dry and cold — you tend to use as much as you can.”

Adds Harris, “Especially if an arena’s too cold, like all the ones that got the hockey ice, it just helps keep your hands moisturized.”

Then there is the general wear and tear on a player’s skin that builds over a long season. “You can see the cracks in them, so I’m probably going to have to do a little tonight,” the Pacers’ T.J. McConnell said before a game late last season, offering his hands to a reporter. Sure enough, during the first dead ball timeout, McConnell visited the table and methodically dipped a finger into a green jar six straight times, massaging the cream into his hands in between each dip.

One Eastern Conference team trainer estimates that their team’s roster burns through 30 combined containers of hand cream and rosin blend in any given year. Fortunately, support staffers get help: In addition to making bulk preseason purchases from “sports medicine distributors,” the trainer writes in an email, the team also receives a “hefty supply” of “gracious” free product from representatives at O’Keeffe’s and Mueller.

“If [they’re] ever missing or not there for use, the player immediately notices,” the trainer writes.

This being the NBA, such scenarios are rare. “If it’s not where it’s usually at, it’s usually there within, like, one complaint,” the Mavericks’ Dwight Powell says. The only time that players risk going bare-handed is during the offseason. Assuming they don’t properly plan for the dry months. “I usually just steal some from the facility,” Brunson says.

The star Knicks guard isn’t the only player with a private stash. “A guy I worked with in L.A. a couple of years ago gave some [Working Hands] to me and I carried it around for a while,” adds Kennard, referring to his time playing for the Clippers. “He knew I’d get mad if I didn’t have it before a workout.” And over the holidays last season, Powell unwrapped a Secret Santa gift from a team staffer to find a fresh green jar.

More than missing or empty containers, though, the biggest potential disruption to a player’s sideline skin care routine is a common reality. When their number is called, there often isn’t enough time for a pit stop en route to the court. “If I have to get in the game quick, I’ll go in,” Kennard says. “But I’ll think about it when I walk past, that’s for sure.”

NO ONE WARNED Wayne Larrivee about the powder. But the former Bulls play-by-play broadcaster learned quickly before his first game next to color commentator Johnny Kerr in 1991, when he found himself in the line of fire as the team’s best player approached the scorer’s table.

“It was the last thing Michael did before he went onto the floor,” Larrivee says. “He made sure he came over and slapped [powder] in both of our faces.”

Generations of NBA stars have since put their riffs on Jordan’s powder routine. Kevin Garnett also aimed at press row, albeit with malice. “It made me smile to see how pissed the writers got, see them holding their papers up in front of their faces,” Garnett wrote in his 2022 memoir. By contrast, a businesslike Kobe Bryant would extend his palms for Lakers trainer Gary Vitti to grab and rub, like a boxer getting treated between rounds.

And James’ signature toss has always been a way for the king to reach his subjects, such as with the “LeBron 6 Chalk” version of his Nike shoe that debuted in 2008, and the social media poll that he posted in 2014 asking fans to vote on whether he should bring the signature toss back to Cleveland after shelving it toward the end of his Miami tenure. (“Yes” won with 95%.)

Of course, the performance element is second-order compared to the practical reason that players stop by the scorer’s table. As James emphasized in a recent episode of the Kelce brothers’ “New Heights” podcast, “I like the [rosin] on my hands, it makes my hands stick with the ball.” But the products are also playing critical roles in an increasing number of rituals around the league today.

Some are serious, as when Tim Hardaway Jr. spells out “WIN” in powder before every Pistons game as a reminder of the ultimate goal. And solemn: After Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milojević died of a heart attack in the middle of last season, guard Brandin Podziemski began drawing a giant heart in rosin blend at the scorer’s table and writing Milojević’s initials in the center. The Celtics’ Holiday similarly scrawls a message of such personal importance that he declined to share details through a team spokesperson.

Other examples are silly, like the imaginary rock piano that the Warriors’ Kevon Looney plays over a rosin pile before tipoff. Or the way that the Sixers’ Oubre smears a chunk of Working Hands cream across one palm, sprinkles a dash of powder on top with the other hand, and swirls them together. “It’s just theatrics for the people sitting behind the table,” Oubre says. “[One] game some fans were laughing real hard, like I was making a pizza or something.”

Then there is the prehistoric method used by the Bucks’ Brook Lopez and Bobby Portis, who mark their entrances into the action by sprinkling powder onto a tiny toy dinosaur that sits atop Milwaukee’s side of the scorer’s table every game, and then rubbing its rosin-dusted back for good luck. “Every little advantage helps,” Portis says.

But the most important routine is often the act of reapplying itself. “It’s a mental thing for me,” Minnesota’s Reid says. It’s why Kennard’s mind momentarily lingers on the cream if he doesn’t have time to snag a scoop at Grizzlies games. And why Towns says he nearly flipped the scorer’s table when he couldn’t find his precious hand powder.

“Any basketball player will tell you that the most important thing is building a routine,” Towns says. “The more you stay on that routine, the more you can feel integrated into the game. You’ve done it so many times, it kind of tricks your mind to put you back into work mode.”

For as much as the cream or chalk helps players’ hands, it also can impact their heads. “It helps you feel more confident in gripping the ball, catching passes, throwing passes, dribbling, shooting, things like that,” Oubre says. “It’s definitely a psychological advantage.

“I’m sure we could do without it. Or we could just spit in our hands. But that’s disgusting.”

DEANDRE JORDAN HAS been in the league so long that he once cured his dry hands with life’s most fundamental substance itself. “At first,” he says, “I just used water.”

The 17-year veteran remembers powder being the preferred option for NBA players when he reached the league in 2008-09, even though he initially “had no idea what it was.” But that was before the dawn of the cream era. Looking at scorers’ tables today, the 36-year-old wonders whether the red bottle’s days are numbered.

“A lot of young boys use the cream,” says Jordan, a Working Hands convert. “The rosin is more of an older generation thing.”

As a 13-year veteran, the Cavs’ Thompson agrees. “There was way more [powder] back then,” he says. “I remember Lance Stephenson, one time he had so much on his hands, he slapped his shorts and you could see his handprint on his shorts. But I think it’s slowed down. I guess the younger generation doesn’t care for it, or need it.”

Total defeat for Team Powder seems unlikely, not as long as there are sweaty palms in need of drying. But it’s also clear that there is no putting back cream in the tube or jar when it comes to that substance’s booming popularity. The Knicks’ Brunson and Hart even signed a sponsorship deal with O’Keeffe’s earlier this season, the first such known arrangement between an NBA player and a scorer’s table skin care brand.

Perhaps another option will emerge, offering a better way for players to mind their mitts. “We’ve already got more ways to get warm, more ways to stay warm, more ways to get ready,” Harris says. “It’s the way things are going. People are innovating.” Or perhaps the cream spreads to new areas of the basketball world: When an opponent left a Working Hands jar by the road bench in Minnesota after a game last season, scorekeepers and timekeepers at Target Center started joking about swiping a few fingerfuls to optimize their sideline button-pushing.

No matter where things head, though, it’s hard to imagine players becoming even more attached to taking care of their hands. “Guys are particular,” Conley says. “Some people are crippled by it. They need it, need it.”

The Wolves’ veteran guard is one to talk. The lotion-y feeling that his shots leave behind at Minnesota’s practice facility is but one example of his Team Cream zeal. He regularly hits up his local CVS or Target to reload on product each offseason. And during a March 2024 overtime loss in Cleveland, less than 250 miles north of the Working Hands factory, he was counted heading to the scorer’s table and swiping from the green jar 16 different times in 32 minutes of action.

Yet, he denies that he’s overly reliant on the ritual.

“I’m impartial, man,” Conley says. “I just like to have that feeling of control.”