Former NBA star Vince Carter was among the big names present at the 2025 Fanatics Fest in the Javits Center in New York City. Carter made an appearance on the Time Out Show at the grand event and delivered a reality check to any NBA fans who might have deluded themselves into believing they can beat the bench players in the league.
“The everyday fan, I want y’all to understand,” Carter began. “Just because you look at the end of that bench, you see that guy that doesn’t play [and think], ‘I will kill him.’ Nah, he will kill you. That is a fact… You go into your front yard, you go into your gym, you’re like, ‘Oh man, nah, I’m doing this.’
“You don’t have [Dwyane Wade] in front of you,” Carter said. “You don’t have D’Angelo Russell in front of you. It’s a difference… You ever watch TV and you watch the game be like, ‘Dang, he nice.’ But then, when you go to the game, it’s a little different. Oh, he bigger, faster, stronger, jump a little higher. That’s what that reality [is] when you stand in front of one of these dudes.”
Only about 500 players get to play in the NBA in a season, which tells you just how good you have to be, even to get on the bench. As Brian Scalabrine, who started just 61 games in an 11-year NBA career, once famously said to a heckler, “I’m closer to LeBron [James] than you are to me.”
The average fan would have trouble beating players in the G League, let alone the ones who have made it to the NBA. Bronny James, for example, is someone who got a lot of flak last season, and he would have easily gotten the better of any of those fans who were ripping him.
We recently got to see an NBA player in a non-NBA setting, at Naji Marshall’s annual mental health awareness celebrity game. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Marshall, who has career averages of 8.8 points, 3.8 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 0.8 steals, and 0.2 blocks per game in the NBA, looked unstoppable in the game.
Naji Marshall giving a daily reminder that NBA players, who play in any other setting, are unstoppable
— Hoop Herald (@TheHoopHerald) August 5, 2025
Marshall is a pretty good player, but he has started 67 games in five seasons in the NBA. A big chunk of those starts (31) came last season for a Mavericks team that was ravaged by injuries. If not for that, the number would be much lower.
So, if you believed you had what it takes to beat a bench player in the NBA, here’s hoping that video changed your mind.
