On Tuesday, ESPN Magazine’s Baxter Holmes published a feature about the oddest of NBA trends: the league’s insatiable obsession with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

It tuns out PB&J has become somewhat of a craze around the NBA, becoming the pregame snack of choice for just about every team.

According to Holmes’ story, the trend began with Kevin Garnett during the 2007-08 season. KG reportedly ate a PB&J on the recommendation of a teammate, then had a good game and made the sandwich part of his routine. As his Celtics team rallied to an NBA title, players on other teams became jealous of the PB&J and requested their own from their teams’ strength coaches.

Now, most teams reportedly prepare 10-20 sandwiches for their players before every game, using varying sets of ingredients. Some franchises take it to an absurd extreme.

The Bucks might boast the NBA’s most elaborate PB&J operation: a pregame buffet featuring smooth, crunchy and almond butters, an assortment of jellies (raspberry, strawberry, grape, blueberry, apricot), three breads from a local bakery (white, wheat and gluten-free) and Nutella. The team scarfs 20 to 30 PB&J’s per game and travels with the ingredients, which rookies prepare on the plane and in visiting locker rooms. They’ve even offered their players PB&J-flavored oatmeal, PB&J recovery shakes, PB&J waffles and PB&J pancakes. Bucks team chef/dietitian Shawn Zell won’t rule out one day making a PB&J burger.

The proposed explanations for the NBA’s peanut butter and jelly craze range from the physiological—the release of opiods and endorphins—to the psychological. Lakers coach Luke Walton, who apparently still eats a PB&J before every game, chalks the whole thing up to, “Athletes are strange people.”

Maybe the most amusing anecdote in Holmes’ story is that when the Lakers staged an intervention to get Dwight Howard to stop eating sugar (He was consuming 12 chocolate bars’ worth of sugar a day), the center made only one demand: He couldn’t cut out peanut butter and jelly.

For what it’s worth, the PB&J lovefest has the grudging approval of most team training staffs.

The typical PB&J contains roughly 400 to 500 calories, 50 grams of carbohydrates, 20 grams of fat and 10 grams of protein. As Jill Lane, a Dallas-based sports nutritionist who has worked with NBA players, says: “It’s not the best, but it’s not bad.”

But nutrition may be beside the point. “Even if we argue that physiologically a PB&J isn’t the ‘best’ pregame meal,” St. Pierre says, “that’s only true if you think psychology doesn’t impact physiology, and we know it does. Your thoughts about a food will actually help to shape how your body reacts to that food.”

Last February, we wrote about the Golden Warriors rebelling when their training staff tried to cut PB&J out of their plane menu, and now we have some more context. It wasn’t just the Warriors addicted to the sandwiches. It was the entire league.

We recommend you read the entire ESPN feature. It’s a lot of fun.

[ESPN]

About Alex Putterman

Alex is a writer and editor for The Comeback and Awful Announcing. He has written for The Atlantic, VICE Sports, MLB.com, SI.com and more. He is a proud alum of Northwestern University and The Daily Northwestern. You can find him on Twitter @AlexPutterman.