The 25 Best Basketball Movies to Stream Now (2024)

It’s easy to mistake Daniel Stern for a young Bill Simmons in Celtic Pride, the 1996 comedy co-written by Judd Apatow and Colin Quinn about a pair of Boston die-hards who worship their teams above, well, everything else. Desperate for the Celtics to beat the Jazz in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, Mike (Stern) and Jimmy (Dan Akroyd) intoxicate and kidnap Utah’s best player, Lewis Scott (Damon Wayans), which inevitably has bigger implications than the final result of a basketball game. It’s a sketch in search of a movie, but it does give us peak Christopher McDonald—at his Happy Gilmore height—playing Utah’s capricious coach.

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Winning the award for most NBA cameos in one movie, Like Mike tells the fantastical tale of Calvin Cambridge (Lil’ Bow Wow), an orphan who laces up some old sneakers with the faded initials “MJ.” His ball skills instantly elevate to superstar levels, prompting the fictional Los Angeles Knights to sign him. This looks like a marketing ploy until Cambridge waxes the floor with perennial All-Stars. He finds the father figure he’s always searched for in his much-taller teammate (played by Morris Chestnut), giving this brand-infused, career trampoline scenario just enough emotional gravitas.

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For more than a minute, the entire gymnasium goes quiet. Michael J. Fox has just transformed into a werewolf and begins dribbling the basketball before stunned teammates and stupefied fans. Eventually he takes advantage by sprinting down the court and finishing with a slam dunk; the horrified shock eventually turns into a happy surprise. This kid can finally play! The movie ranks near the very bottom when it comes to portraying quality basketball, but Teen Wolf, as his classmates eventually call him, somehow becomes an incredible athlete, ball hog, and minor celebrity who struggles to harness his hair-growing, eye-glowing instincts. The logic of this is preposterous, but Fox has enough charm to pull it off—even on a full moon.

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Look past all of Air Bud's kids-movie antics. Forget for a second that Air Bud is made out to be a better grade school hooper than you were. Just flat-out forget all the literal clown stuff, please. You know what you have left? A story about a boy and his dog. Someday, Air Bud will move past its place in '90s-kid canon and into the actual great-movie echelon. Get ahead of it now and put respect on the name of our pup Buddy. And we dare the iciest heart not to cry at the pudding scene.

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The first time he starts to dribble, it’s clear that Leonardo DiCaprio can’t actually play basketball. But this determination doesn’t really matter in The Basketball Diaries, based on poet Jim Carroll’s memoir by the same name. The star status playing on the “hottest Catholic High School basketball team in New York City” burns quickly and brightly for Carroll, who is sexually abused by his coach and submerges into a destructive drug addiction. It’s a bleak depiction of athletic potential wasted. Instead of providing a way out, basketball offers a glimpse of what could have been.

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It borders cliché to write it at this point, but it really is true: Steven Soderbergh really is the master of making a stellar film in any genre. After trying his hand at horror, stripper comedy, and about a dozen other things, Soderbergh took on a sports film in High Flying Bird. But it's not the story you'd expect. High Flying Bird follows the uber-uber-dramatic life of a modern-day sports agent. With NBA player cameos and André Holland's spectacular performance, High Flying Bird is one of the most true-to-life sports films you'll ever come across.

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Following in the footsteps of the great Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance, Netflix gave the 2004 Men's Olympic Basketball Team another highlight in The Redeem Team. Sure, these recent talking-head basketball documentaries are beginning to the blend together in my mind a bit—but The Redeem Team features some unforgettable moments between LeBron James and the late Kobe Bryant.

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If you only learned about basketball by watching movies, then you’d believe New York City is the only hotbed of prime talent that college coaches have forgotten to recruit. Fast Break doubles down on this premise, in which a delicatessen owner (Gabe Kaplan) fulfills his dream of coaching basketball by accepting a job at a miniscule Nevada college. Before he leaves his wife and heads west, he collects a handful of inner-city kids he wants to give a second chance. Throughout sorting his team’s requisite problems, he burns through the competition to reach the reliable big game against vaunted Nevada State. Refreshingly, the movie sticks to the court without straying to the casino.

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At the beginning of Rebound, a reporter asks Kareem Abdul-Jabar which player was the greatest he’d ever seen. His answer is Earl Manigault, aka “The Goat,” the subject of this HBO biopic starring Don Cheadle, who channels the rise, fall, and redemption of the Harlem playground legend. An elite guard and prolific jumper, Manigault blows a chance at college and spirals into drug addiction, wasting the potential that a neighborhood sanitation worker (Forrest Whitaker) sees in him. His reemergence as a community leader is shortchanged in the movie but remains a significant part of his legacy throughout New York.

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It's a formula we've seen before. A guy who could have been a great NBA player if he didn't have a tragic past comes back to coach a team of high school players, saving himself and inspiring his team at the same time. And yet, it really works in The Way Back, which stars Ben Affleck, Al Madrigal, and a kid who plays a baller with the NBA2K-like name Chubbs Hendricks.

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In Hustle, Adam Sandler stars as a basketball scout for the Philadelphia 76ers who bets it all on an international recruit from Spain: Bo Cruz (Juancho Hernangomez). Hernangomez, an actual NBA player, plays the part with tons charm—and he even shares a fun-as-hell rivalry with Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards.

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Directed by Spike Lee and made in conjunction with ESPN, Kobe Doin' Work is probably the most unfiltered and up close anyone has ever gotten to an NBA star. With cameras all over the stadium and team locker room, Spike films an entire playoff game, an interview with Kobe Bryant, and live play-by-play commentary of the legend just 'doin work. It's the kind of access every NBA fan wishes they had today.

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It’s nearly impossible to keep track of how many dunks occur in Above the Rim, a movie that takes its title very seriously. The kind of street ball its high school hotshot protagonist Kyle (Duane Martin) embraces is in opposition to the style his head coach and college scouts want him to play. A glorified ball hog, Kyle gets in too deep with a Harlem drug dealer (a villainous Tupac Shakur), whose older brother (Leon), a former high school star turned security guard, begins dating Kyle’s mother. The performances—including small roles for Marlon Wayans and Bernie Mac—give extra weight to an unpredictable playground tournament finale that is wonderful and frightening at the same time.

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A heavy rainstorm provides the backdrop for a mistaken murder, turning an otherwise sunny basketball inspirational tale into a disheartening courtroom procedural. Nathanial “Cornbread” Hamilton, embodied by NBA star Jamaal Wilkes, plays big brother to neighbors Wilfred (Lawrence Fishburne) and Earl (Tierre Turner), but weeks before heading to college he’s tragically killed by police, who confuse him for a criminal. More than 40 years later, the movie remains sadly pertinent to today and a young Fishburne’s stirring testimony in the final scene is a moving reminder of what kind of actor he’d become.

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Aside from creating an earworm hit song, Space Jam provided the ideal star vehicle for Michael Jordan, whose mythos enhanced with this classic entertainment venture. Mixing animation with some of the game’s biggest stars, the movie teams Jordan up with the Looney Tunes to play a basketball game against supercharged aliens that have taken his NBA peers’ skills hostage. The “MonStars” soon learn they should never challenge a team featuring the greatest of all-time, especially when he has help from Bill Murray, who continues his demon defeating on the hardwood.

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How could a talented Black basketball player from the Bronx be the best writer inside an elite Manhattan private school? You might call this Gus Van Sant’s spiritual New York sequel to Good Will Hunting, challenging stereotypes and reminding us not to judge books by their covers. Jamal (Rob Brown), the phenom in question, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a famous Scottish novelist turned recluse (Sean Connery), who becomes a prickly mentor to the 16-year old. Even though Jamal carries a basketball in nearly every scene (the kid is a natural), the climax swaps the court for the classroom, where it’s clear a Pulitzer awaits his future.

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Let's get this straight: Uncut Gems is a basketball movie. Take it from its directors/Knicks superfans, the Safdie Brothers, who say the already-legendary Sandler outing is most definitely a sports film. That said: Uncut Gems is a trip. Sandler plays a jeweler hellbent on gambling an ungodly amount of money on a Celtics game. Chaos, sex, guns, drugs ensue. Plus, Kevin Garnett as Kevin Garnett, which would've genuinely been Oscar-worthy if he had more screen-time. Sure, Uncut Gems won't convey the feeling of playing a basketball game to you. But it sure as hell will make you sweat like you just gambled on one.

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Glory Road begins with archival footage of changing times. It’s the mid-1960s and indeed, times are changing at Texas Western University, where Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) shows up to take over the basketball program. Without recruiting support, he finds seven Black players—with little chance to attend college—to fill up his squad. Throughout the Miners’ nearly undefeated season, they experience all kinds of resistance to integration, which comes to a boil when Haskins makes history by starting five African-American players in the National Championship game. Nothing surprises here, and nothing really disappoints, in this competently made retrospective.

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Considered Remember the Titans on a basketball court, Coach Carter relishes every ounce of Samuel L. Jackson as the dictatorial head coach that takes over an unmotivated team and changes its entire culture with some strict, well-intentioned rules and caustic temperament. Based off the real Ken Carter, who famously locked out his 1999 Richmond High School team from playing until its grades improved, the movie embraces the tension of winning expectations and academic integrity. Come for Jackson’s burns, stay for Rick Gonzalez quoting Marianne Williamson and softening your heart.

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