As Cracked's foremost Space Jam Authority and Occasional Wearer Of Shoes, I obviously have a lot of issues.
We're going to dig into the commercial at hand in a minute, but I wanted to take a brief sidebar to discuss what I see as a very troubling relationship among the three boys watching Blake and his friend Dr. Drain play.
The boy in the red shirt ("Red Shirt") says to his friends, "I think that's Blake Griffin," while looking up close at a person who could ONLY be Blake Griffin (he has Blake's size, skin-tone, obvious basketball prowess, and the other male on the court loudly calls him "Shake Griffin" [and later "Quake Griffin" and "Steak Griffin"]). His one friend in the hoodie ("Hoodie") seems to consider this possibility, but their one friend with the hat ("Squidward") immediately dismisses this with a thoughtless, "Nah."
Nike
With eyes like that he'll make a great official someday.
I don't want to harp on this too much, but Squidward is never punished for doubting his friend. Squidward never even says, "Oh, you're right, that IS Blake; I'm sorry for dismissing you so rudely." Nothing. This could have been a teachable moment about hubris, and Nike let it slip away.
Instead, Blake does some rad moves, the skeptics are swayed, and we transition into the meat of the commercial, where a professional basketball player faces off against a faceless, tiny space monster in a slam-dunk contest. Squidward barely even checked to confirm if the basketball player was Blake Griffin; he had already decided that his friend Red Shirt was wrong, sight unseen. This speaks volumes about the toxicity of their friendship. I imagine that this isn't the first time Squidward's instincts drew him toward thinking Red Shirt was instantly wrong, and you can't have that in a friendship. You want your friends to support you. If Red Shirt is as good at evaluating his own self-worth as he is at identifying who in a given crowd might be Blake Griffin (which, based on the limited information with which we are presented, we have to assume is "very"), then he should exit this friendship and hook up with some people whose knee-jerk reactions don't involve putting him down.
Nike
"I think that's Blake Griffin."
"Saying stuff like that is why your dad's an alcoholic."
208 Comments