Reebok’s $10M Gamble on Angel Reese Just BLEW UP—Layup Disaster Goes Viral!

It was supposed to be a moment of triumph. A polished highlight to justify one of the boldest endorsement deals in women’s basketball history. Instead, it became a clip so excruciating that it may haunt Angel Reese — and Reebok’s marketing department — for years to come.

The scene unfolded in the third quarter of what should have been a routine, mid-season game. Reese, the 6’3” phenom Reebok proudly handed a $10 million shoe contract to earlier this year, found herself in the perfect scoring position. The defense was beat. The lane was wide open. The crowd was on its feet. All she had to do was drop in a simple layup — the most basic of basketball shots, the one every player masters before they even learn the three-point line exists.

What happened next didn’t just defy expectation. It defied geometry.

Reese went up strong… and somehow missed everything. Not just the rim. Not just the net. She missed the entire backboard. The ball sailed past like a paper airplane caught in the wrong breeze. Gasps filled the arena. But the real sting? The laughter.

And not the polite, “oh, mistakes happen” kind of chuckle. No — this was full-on, in-your-face, open-mic laughter from television commentators who couldn’t restrain themselves. “I… I don’t even know what that was,” one broadcaster said between snickers. His co-host simply covered his mouth and muttered, “That’s… wow,” before dissolving again into awkward giggles.

In the world of pro sports, mistakes happen. Air-balls happen. But this was different. This was catastrophic optics. In one moment, the player Reebok had just anointed as the face of its new women’s basketball campaign looked less like a game-changer and more like a blooper reel.

Social media pounced within seconds. The clip hit X (formerly Twitter) before the ball even touched the floor, racking up hundreds of thousands of views in minutes. On Instagram, slo-mo edits with captions like “Bro… what was that??” went viral. TikTok creators layered it with clown music, slow zooms, and reaction memes. By midnight, “Angel Reese layup” was trending in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe.

For Reebok, this is more than a bad highlight. It’s a potential branding nightmare. Just months ago, the company made headlines by outbidding several competitors to sign Reese to a reported $10 million endorsement deal — a move heralded as both a savvy business decision and a statement of commitment to women’s sports. Reese, fresh off her rookie season and brimming with charisma, was supposed to represent dominance, confidence, and precision on the court. That image now has a crack in it — one big enough to drive a viral hashtag through.

“Look, every athlete has bad moments,” sports marketing consultant Lyle Harrington told SportsLine in a phone interview. “But the difference here is the timing and the visibility. This wasn’t in a quiet preseason game. This was on national television, mid-season, with Reebok already rolling out major campaigns featuring her. And the nature of the miss — it’s not just a brick, it’s… whatever that was — makes it unforgettable. That’s the kind of clip brands pray never exists.”

Reebok has so far declined to comment, though insiders say the marketing team spent the better part of Wednesday “monitoring sentiment” online and debating whether to lean into the moment with humor or attempt to bury it with new highlights. The problem? There are no new highlights yet. Reese finished the game with a quiet stat line: 6 points, 5 rebounds, 2 turnovers.

Teammates rushed to defend her after the game. “We all have off plays,” one said. “It’s just basketball. You move on.” But privately, even some within the locker room admitted the sheer weirdness of the miss was hard to process. “I’ve never seen someone completely miss the backboard on a layup in my career,” another player said off-record. “Not in high school. Not in AAU. Not in the pros. It’s… yeah. It’s rough.”

Fans, of course, were less diplomatic. Comment threads turned brutal, with some accusing Reese of being “overhyped” and others questioning whether Reebok had “bought into a personality, not a player.” The clip even spawned a wave of parody videos, including one in which the ball is edited to fly into the stands, bounce off a hot-dog vendor, and knock over a soda machine.

For Reese, the challenge now is not just to make shots — it’s to reclaim the narrative. In the age of social media, one bad play can define a player for months unless it’s quickly erased by a string of highlight-worthy performances. And for Reebok, whose $10 million gamble was meant to be a slam dunk in the fight for market share against Nike and Adidas, the urgency is even greater.

“This is why brands don’t just buy talent,” Harrington noted. “They buy the idea of consistency. Angel has the charisma, the style, the fanbase — but if the on-court product looks shaky, the brand story collapses.”

There’s no question Angel Reese will have better games ahead. She’s too skilled, too competitive, to be defined by one missed layup. But in the ruthless world of sports marketing, moments matter — and sometimes, the wrong one can outweigh a dozen right ones.

For now, the clip lives on, looping endlessly across feeds, reminding everyone that in sports, glory and disaster can be separated by the width of a rim — or in this case, the width of an entire backboard. And somewhere in Reebok’s headquarters, someone is probably staring at a $10 million contract and wondering if their sure-thing investment just became the year’s most expensive meme.