Friendship Bracelets, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Story of the Dario Šarić Girl
Twitter Sensation Leviya Argiropoulos and her Bond with the NBA’s Biggest “Homie”
Leviya Argiropoulos has spent her life in search of a world full of sunshine and rainbows, one softer, more magical and more caring than this one. On Feb. 27, 2024, she had the chance to meet the only athlete who could take her there.
Instead of watching her beloved 76ers get dismantled by the Celtics with Joel Embiid yet again sidelined, she decided to go by herself to the Warriors-Wizards game two miles from her apartment in Washington, D.C. The unserious Wizards — the closest NBA team to American University, where Argiropoulos was attending — were sitting at 9-48 on the year. Almost everybody in the building was there to witness whatever magic Stephen Curry had in store. Argiropoulos was there for Dario Šarić.
To most NBA followers, Šarić was but a journeyman rounding out the Warriors’ second unit. A methodical Croatian big who can provide a nightly pick-and-pop three and a creative pass out of the post, but not much more. A player who showed potential in his first two seasons to be a major part of the Sixers’ rebuild, only to be dealt for a more impactful Jimmy Butler and become a now-30-year-old veteran in what felt like the blink of an eye.
But Argiropoulos had developed a special interest in Šarić that began in March of 2020, well after he’d been traded away from her favorite team. She’s written countless tweets, essays and poems since then reflecting on why she took such a strong liking. She still doesn’t entirely know why.
Argiropoulos had the day mapped out. She’d watch her favorite player play in person for the first time since his Sixers days, and she’d give him a friendship bracelet she made with letters and colors representing all the teams Šarić had played on since his NBA career began in 2016. No autograph or photo needed — she just wanted to make Šarić smile the way he made her smile.
It didn’t go as planned. She stood in the pregame crowd gathered over the tunnel at Capital One Arena, clamoring for Curry and Klay Thompson’s attention. A young girl standing next to her was there on her birthday and held a jersey she wanted Curry to sign. Argiropoulos let her cut in front. She was too kind to hold her ground, and the moment passed her by.
By the game’s end, Šarić had scored five points and turned the ball over three times in 14 minutes off the bench. He made a hasty beeline for the locker room before the clock expired on the Warriors’ 11-point win, well before Argiropoulos could even think about trying to give him the bracelet. It wasn’t his best night, and it wasn’t Argiropoulos’s, either.
“It was an absolute flop of a night. It was literally raining; it was humid,” Argiropoulos said, describing her walk home from her failed mission. “I was wearing a [Šarić] jersey from Fanatics and the letters started peeling off.”
She spent that walk, and the ensuing few days, questioning her fandom — not of Šarić, but of the NBA. In some ways, she found it easier and more fulfilling to enjoy the league from afar — through watching it on TV, through social media, through her imagination — than from the stands.
Argiropoulos shelled out $250 for a vantage point just close enough to notice the players talking to spectators rich enough to sit courtside, but just far enough that Šarić wouldn’t hear if she cheered for him. In that moment, the NBA felt simultaneously less awe-inspiring and less human. It was just a cold business, and she felt embarrassed for ever thinking otherwise.
…
Argiropoulos’s X/Twitter account, @lisco_2000, is the main place where she turns the NBA into the soft, kind world she seeks. The 22-year-old New Jersey native and current New York City resident has garnered over 6,800 followers posting about Šarić nearly every day, which earned her the nickname “the Dario Šarić girl.”
There are thousands of fan pages on social media dedicated to individual NBA players. Some fall under the “PlayerMuse” category, where fans use the sports statistic database, StatMuse, to post graphics highlighting their favorite player’s accomplishments. Some posts highlight videos edited to carefully selected songs. Some accounts even pretend to be players.
Most of these accounts are dedicated to All-Star caliber players like Curry. While role player fan pages exist, they usually contain a tinge of irony. But Argiropoulos’s colorful page, adorned with a profile picture of her orange cat, Tango, stands out as a genuine fan page for an unlikely player.
“Some people say it’s like poetry watching somebody like Steph Curry or Nikola Jokic play, but I think that about Dario,” Argiropoulos said. “Most people don’t get it, but it’s beautiful to me.”
Before Argiropoulos became an avid basketball fan, her parents frequently had the Sixers on TV at home. She gradually grew an attachment to the team throughout the 2016-18 seasons when Šarić played there. Her special interest, however, only “clicked” on March 10, 2020. Šarić was in his prime form that day, scoring 24 points against the Trail Blazers as a member of the Suns. Argiropoulos had just come home from a school trip at Disney World where she was bullied by her peers, and watching Šarić play helped her feel better.
The next day, Rudy Gobert caught COVID and the NBA paused its season with no clear end in sight. Argiropoulos was left with nothing to do but sit in her room, browse Twitter and fall down the Šarić rabbit hole.
“I think the world shutting down after a week of literal fight-or-flight was just so jarring, it catapulted me into this,” Argiropoulos said. “It was comforting for me to have something to turn to when everything else in my life felt so terrible.”
Argiropoulos uses social media as an outlet to interact with her special interest, but in person, she tends to keep it to herself. Isabelle Kravis, her close friend from American University, isn’t a basketball fan. Argiropoulos usually spares her the details.
“I feel like there’s just one version of her that’s the sports version, and then there’s the other version [their friend group] hangs out with,” Kravis said. “We talk about sports, obviously, but not in the very niche and fangirl way that she does online.”
Online, Argiropoulos has become a walking, smiling Dario Šarić encyclopedia. She details and publicizes Šarić’s career, from his 2014 Adriatic League MVP with Croatian club KK Cibona, to his 2021 NBA Rookie of the Year snub, to his devastating torn ACL in 2021 just two minutes after checking into his first-ever NBA Finals game.
More recently, she doesn’t have all that many Šarić highlights or statlines to react to, since the now-Denver Nugget has fallen out of coach Mike Malone’s rotation. Instead, she posts primarily about Šarić, the person, and all the silly situations he’s found himself in.
“Remember when Dario got COVID so bad in 2021, he told Croatian media he was dying and they ran with it a little?” reads a tweet of hers as part of an affectionate thread about Šarić’s proclivity for “melancholy.”
Šarić has a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve when things don’t go his way, but the heart he wears is one of gold. Nicknamed “The Homie” thanks to a very-of-its-time tweet by former Sixers teammate Joel Embiid in 2014, Šarić lives up to the moniker by being one of the NBA’s gentlest, friendliest teammates. He’s even kind to elephants; he called one “a great guy” after a Nuggets team trip to the Denver Zoo.
“Mostly, I stan Dario for his kindness,” Argiropoulos said. “He doesn’t need to play spectacularly well all the time.”
Argiropoulos describes herself in her Instagram bio as a “Tumblr-brained fangirl,” which she describes as the kind of fan “that does fanfiction and shipping and goes ‘ASDFGHJKL’ when something makes us geek out.” Before Šarić became her special interest, she was a Tumblr-brained fangirl of other special interests, such as the bands Franz Ferdinand and Daft Punk. Those phases came and went; now she’s busy pushing the boundaries of what people expect a sports fan to look and act like.
NBA Twitter has long been seen as an unwelcome place for female, queer and neurodivergent people, according to Argiropoulos, who falls under all three labels. The word “stan” most commonly refers to obsessive and mostly female fans of musicians, naturally conflicting with the much more male-dominated space of pro sports. Argiropolous said that “stanning” a player in a traditional, feminine sense was something she was bullied for early on in her NBA Twitter days, but she is now breaking the stigma.
“I think [bringing stan culture into sports] makes sports a more welcoming place so that people who feel like they don’t fit in are like, ‘Oh, maybe I can see myself in sports fandom, because it’s not all just men yelling at me. There are people who are cool and there are people who are like me here,’” she said.
Argiropoulos always wanted to humanize athletes. At first, she wanted to accomplish this by pursuing sports journalism at American, but she eventually changed her major to communication studies because she grew tired of journalists’ emphasis on neutrality. Kravis, who worked with her at the university newspaper The Eagle, said Argiropoulos campaigned to establish a sports culture and analysis section in the paper for opinionated sports commentary. There was initial resistance among the staff — including from Kravis, who was a managing copy editor at the time — but they ultimately allowed her to create and edit the section. It has continued to exist and grow since Argiropoulos graduated in 2024.
Now a digital media editor for Bloomberg, Kravis’s perspective on journalism changed over time as she grew closer with Argiropoulos. “We never used to publish commentary that would push the envelope on what sports meant, and I think that especially in sports, that’s needed,” she said.
Argiropoulos still dabbles in reporting, including a part-time job with Golden State of Mind, SB Nation’s Warriors blog, that started when Šarić signed with the team in 2023. However, her real passion lies in her freelance creative writing, where she has full freedom to write as personally as she pleases. “Blink Once. Blink Twice.” and “Molded from Clay; Forged by the Gods” — two pieces she has published on the basketball blog Between the Keys — read like diary entries influenced by her hours of writing and consuming fanfiction as a child. She uses Šarić’s story as a way to reflect on her own. Šarić is her idol, her imaginary friend, and a comfortable vehicle to make sense of uncomfortable emotions.
The way she treats Šarić bleeds into the way she treats the NBA as a whole. It sounds crazy, but simply being positive about basketball right now is an act of disruption. The NBA and its media are experiencing an odd patch where negativity is the norm. Everyone has their take on why ratings are down and the league is a shell of its former self — even TV analysts like Shaquille O’Neal, who has openly admitted to not watching teams he deems “boring.”
Mainstream Twitter fan discourse is reaching all-time levels of pessimism, revolving around pitting players against each other, comparing legacies and ring counts in an effort to figure out who is the bigger fraud. Argiropoulos’s little corner of the internet forgoes that conversation entirely. In her world, a player’s accomplishments don’t determine their value; their humanity does.
“I’m not trying to pose myself as any kind of counterculture,” Argiropoulos said. “That’s just who I am.”
…
On October 29, 2024, the Nuggets made a trip to Brooklyn to play the Nets. Dario Šarić arrived at the Barclays Center three games into his new role of backing up Denver’s Nikola Jokić. Argiropoulos had just moved to New York to begin her master’s in media, culture and communications at New York University. The stars had aligned for her to make another attempt.
Argiropoulos didn’t want a repeat of the Wizards game, where she was alone in a sea of Curry fans who nearly trampled her. She brought a friend this time, who did most of the work to grab Dario’s attention during warmups.
“I can’t scream for him,” Argiropoulos remembers telling her friend. “Like, you have to do this for me. I physically can’t; my body won’t let me try to get his attention.”
Eventually, Šarić noticed them and walked over. He listened as Argiropoulos stumbled through her long-winded explanation, and he held the bracelets in his hands as she flipped the beads to show the messages. This time, she had two bracelets: her year-old one with all of Šarić’s different teams minus Denver, plus a new one that read “Trust the Friendship.” It had the Nuggets’ rainbow color scheme from the 1980s, but it was an ode to his Sixers stint. Šarić had coined the term as a play on the team’s “Trust the Process” mantra in a 2017 Instagram post about his bond with then-teammate T.J. McConnell.
Šarić was delighted at the reference to one of his fondest NBA memories. They took a photo and thanked each other. Šarić ran to the bench and tucked the bracelets into his bag.
“Just kind of proof that there’s no downside to being kind and there’s no downside to being outgoing and expressing yourself,” Argiropoulos said.
…
I took that advice to heart when I asked the Nuggets about interviewing Šarić and having him speak face-to-face with Argiropoulos. It seemed like a long shot that he would take the time to talk to two college students in the middle of his season, over four months after receiving the bracelets. Even Argiropoulos was unsure; she has always been worried about overstepping boundaries as a superfan.
On Thursday, he gave us 30 minutes of his time over Zoom while sitting in the team facility after practice. He was not only aware of Argiropoulos; he was appreciative, and he still keeps her bracelets at home.
“I’m not, like, a superstar or star player, but when you have somebody who’s shooting for you it’s always a good thing, you know?” Šarić said. “This proves you’re doing something right.”
Šarić’s eyes lit up at the chance to reminisce about his career. As Argiropoulos eagerly nodded with Tango in her lap, Šarić reminisced about his friendship with McConnell and his time with the Sixers, the team he said was “the best fit” for him. He reminisced about getting traded midseason in 2018 just as he was getting comfortable in Philadelphia and struggling to find consistency afterward. He reminisced about last season’s run with the Warriors, a team he believed could’ve gone further than the play-in if they’d taken better shots in crunch time. He reminisced about turning back the clock with a triple-double performance in last summer’s Olympic Qualifiers.
Argiropoulos has long been a proponent of Šarić returning to play in Europe where his skill set fits in more naturally, and where he has an easier route to playing time. Šarić confirmed that he wants to play five-to-seven more years in Europe once his time in the NBA is over and potentially try to bring a Croatian league championship to his hometown team, GKK Šibenka.
Šarić trusted us immediately. He asked Argiropoulos questions — about herself, about her fandom, about the Sixers — for a good 10 minutes. He was honest about the best and worst moments of his NBA career, almost like he was catching up with his friends.
That’s why Argiropoulos loves him, and it’s why her followers on social media do, too. She has created a loving community of NBA fans, many of them neurodivergent and queer, who struggle to fit into the hypermasculine world of sports for one reason or another. Šarić, unknowingly, has become a de facto icon of that community through Argiropoulos’s posts.
In today’s world, people who are different aren’t empowered to express themselves freely, Šarić said. “And if I can inspire them in a way to be brave, of course we are all there for that.”
Šarić does not have a Twitter account and rarely posts on Instagram. While he knows his fandom exists, he doesn’t fully understand why. But after meeting Argiropoulos, he is beginning to.
“I mean, I’m happy, but in my mind, I never thought I’m that good to have fans,” he said. “But once you think it’s not just about how good you are, it makes you think, ‘okay. It’s not just basketball; it’s another way too.’”
“Right,” Argiropoulos said back. “It’s on a human level.”
