Orlando Magic guard Jalen Suggs has been starting games with an unusual style move.
ByMatthew Roberson
November 20, 2025
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Headband. Head. Band. It’s right there in the name. These are bands to be worn on your head. But Jalen Suggs, the 24-year-old Orlando Magic point guard, can’t be constrained by traditional logic like that. Suggs is an out-of-the-box thinker, you see. Rather than playing basketball with his headband on his head (rote, predictable, done thousands of times already), for the past few games he’s been sporting it around his neck (awesome, out of nowhere, makes you wonder if it’s an accident).
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Suggs hasn’t been doing the throat band for entire games, however, probably due to the fact that it would be really uncomfortable to do so. There’s a reason no one in the NBA dribbles up the court in a turtleneck, after all. Instead, Suggs will start the first quarter with the band snugly around his Adam’s apple, and then slide it up to his forehead after a few minutes.
“It’s funny. I don’t even know [if] there’s an explanation for it,” Suggs told Jason Beede, beat reporter for the Orlando Sentinel. “Really it originates as football drip, that’s where it stems from. But I don’t know, there really isn’t much else to it. I wear it on my neck, and once I feel into the game, into the flow, I put it on my head and we rock.”
Rock on! Whatever the reason, the oddball accessory seems to be working: Suggs, whose Magic got over .500 with a convincing win over the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday, has been hooping. In each of his last six games—four of which have been Orlando victories—Suggs has registered double-digit points. Across those half dozen games, he’s averaging 14.5 points, 5.0 assists, and 1.5 steals per game, while making exactly half of his shots. Unfortunately, even with the statistical revolution that’s taken over the NBA, we don’t have any metrics for how Suggs performs with the headband around his neck vs. on his dome. We do have video evidence of him scoring at least two points at Madison Square Garden with this unusual garb, though.
As for the “football drip” part of his quote, there’s a few things to know. One is that Suggs was a top-level high school player—so good, in fact, that he quarterbacked his team to a Minnesota state championship as a junior, and then followed that up as a senior by becoming the first person in state history to win both the Mr. Basketball and Mr. Football awards in the same year. This isn’t just a case of an athlete overexaggerating their childhood skills, either. Many of the country’s collegiate gridiron dynasties—Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and Notre Dame, to name a few—offered him football scholarships. Instead, Suggs chose to play college hoops at Gonzaga, where he said the school’s lack of football program was perfect, because it eliminated temptation to strap on the helmet again.
The second thing to know is that Suggs is likely a well-educated student of the sports swag game, and this move is an homage to Deion Sanders. During his playing days, Sanders was fond of wearing a headband around his neck as well, adding a piece of flair just beneath his chinstrap and right above the shoulder pads.
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We don’t know exactly when Suggs started dressing like this, but the earliest photo on Getty Images depicting the headband around his neck is from the Magic’s very first game this season. Granted, this was in warmups, but Suggs came out for pregame player intros on opening night with the style swerve already in place.
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Five days later, after a game in Philly, Suggs was at it again. The Getty library doesn’t have any shots of him doing it during the action, though.
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Here he is on the bench, cheering on his teammates in Washington DC with the neck accoutrement.
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The in-game debut of this look might have been at the Garden on November 12, and since the Magic beat the Knicks that night, it makes sense that Suggs continued the tradition into Orlando’s game on November 14 against the Nets. Pro athletes are nothing if not superstitious.
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With the NBA season still in its larval phase, there aren’t a ton of storylines that have fully solidified yet. Your favorite player is probably either injured or recovering from an injury. The Detroit Pistons are atop the Eastern Conference, but we also haven’t reached Thanksgiving yet. A few playoff teams from last year (the Pacers, Clippers, and Grizzlies) appear doomed to not repeat that fate, while some young upstarts (the Spurs, Raptors, and Hawks) are hinting that they’re ready to level up. But forget all that for a second, because the only NBA story that really matters right now is: How long will Jalen Suggs continue wearing a headband about ten inches lower than we’re accustomed to seeing them?
“It’s funny to see all the traction it’s gotten, to be honest,” he said to Beede. “But yeah, I don’t know. That’s just me being J-Suggs.”
Keep on being J-Suggs, J-Suggs.