The Moment That Made Them: JP Macura

Xavier’s TBT team is comprised of fan favorites and cult heroes of teams gone by. In this brief series we are going to focus on the moment that encapsulates that players career. This won’t necessarily be the guy’s best game or his biggest scoring output, but it will be the one (we think) that demonstrates what he meant to the program or the one that everyone will remember. Feel free to disagree in the comments and on Twitter.

I’ll be honest right from the off, there is no way to pick one moment for JP. Someone doesn’t become a beloved fan icon based on just one single moment in an entire career. Ask anyone and they may have a moment or a game that made them fall in love with Xavier’s floppy haired trickster. Forced to choose, though, three stand out.

The Butler Dunk

Everyone hats Butler. They have an absurdly inflated view of themselves that seems to stem mostly from the fact that there was a famous movie filmed in their gym that they have faithfully kept to the specs when it was built as a barn in the 1910s. They bring an actual dog to games, their fans exist mostly to fil some sort of midwestern cornpone stereotype, and their team isn’t actually very good. Also, they cheat.

(Click that tweet and you’ll see the ancient technology called Vine that captured the moment.)

Did JP need to dunk that ball? Of course not. Would a different player just have dribbled time out? Probably. Butler deserves stuff like this though, which made it hilarious. Butler hates JP, which made it doubly hilarious.

The Seton Hall tip dunk

This game not only mattered more in the scheme of actual basketball, it was still a contest when JP did this. For whatever reason the Pirates fans had taken a disliking to our lovable hero and had been verbally abusing him all game. Rude. With Seton Hall fading despite a late lead in a vital game, JP grabbed a Trevon Bluiett miss and hammered it home with one hand. When the crowd fell silent, JP definitely didn’t, unleashing a tirade that this video clip sees fit to cut out. That dunk also gave us this incredible still.

Yeah, hoody guy, that was pretty good.

The Gator Chomp

At some point in life you have to decide what dude you are. This story in three parts starts with the Wisconsin crowd chanting some rather off color things at JP. Rude. Again. What does the poor guy do to deserve this?

Lost in all these moments is that JP is a really, really good basketball player. Trevon Bluiett couldn’t get it going this game (comparatively, he still scored 25 he just didn’t shoot well), but JP did. He went 10-12 inside the arc and made the buckets that kept Xavier in the game and eventually got them over the top. When he finished Xavier’s late run with an alleyp oop dunk, he headed to the Wisconsin student section to let them know what had just happened. As per the norm, he knew just the right button to push.

Man, I love this guy.