Sports website Clutchpoints has become a social media juggernaut thanks largely to their brand of fun, over-the-top graphics that frequently go viral among NBA fandom.
The man behind the Clutchpoints operation is 28-year old Nish Patel, who created a popular Derrick Rose Facebook page during his time as a student at UCLA and then the pretty successful ‘NBA Memes‘ brand in 2012. NBA Memes became a quick success, growing from 100,000 followers the first week to a million fans in just a month. Today there are five million NBA Memes fans, according to Patel.
“I didn’t want to just build a meme company but a media company,” Patel said in an interview with HoopsHype. “So we started creating these individual team pages like Cavs Nation, Warriors Nation… We built the largest Facebook pages for 90 percent of teams that groups the Twitters, the Instagrams, the TikToks… That really taught us what do fans really care about. We’re trying to take every single moment that happens and put the most creative twist we can be.”
Clutchpoints is a well-funded operation with investors like former NBA star Baron Davis and a team of 15 graphic designers plus another 15 social editors.
“There’s always like three or four people online,” Patel said. “So it’s up to them to communicate amongst each other and be like okay, ‘Will this be taken the wrong way, maybe racially, sexually…?’ Those are the questions we always ask before we post anything. We don’t want to get any backlash on that kind of stuff. So those are the final questions that are asked, and we have like a ‘Do not do list’ that they have to look through and checkmark before they post anything.”
“So now we want to take what they love from us, our graphics, and give it to them in video form whether it be animation, original content, video series, documentaries… That’s going to be our next step. How does culture meet trending TV shows meet sports? That’s our bread and butter.”
But which of the graphics created by Clutchpoints are Patel’s favorites? We asked him to put together a list of 10 that you can check below: