SAN FRANCISCO — Aaron Gordon gets hyphy when he’s near his hometown.
His string of exceptional scoring performances at Golden State might seem to defy explanation, but it turns out there is one. Home is where the heart is, or in Gordon’s case, where the ear is.
“Man, the DJ was playing slaps, you know what I mean?” the Nuggets forward said after Denver’s season-opening overtime loss on Thursday. “So I’m vibing the whole game. He’s playing the straight Bay that I grew up with. Just like hyphy music, you know what I mean?”
He’s talking about Oakland-style hip-hop, the frenetic subgenre that emerged in the ’90s and spread across the Bay Area as he was growing up in San Jose in the early aughts.