The Board Room Gift Ideas

Curio is the small, odd end of the room — a bottle opener, a desk trophy, a framed three-pointer, an ornament — and it exists for one specific problem: the fan who has already been given every obvious thing.

There is no size to get wrong here and mostly no team to choose. These are one-offs rather than lines, which makes them the easiest pieces in the room to buy for somebody you know a little less well, and the hardest to accidentally buy twice.

The far return is the material itself, cut small: a desk frame, a pendant, a brooch. Same reclaimed court as the bay opposite, sized to wear or to stand next to a keyboard.

It is a short list because it is a short line. Everything on it is one idea at a different scale, which makes it the right shelf for somebody who liked the mini court but has no desk to put one on.

The right-hand tank holds one figure. The line behind it runs to sixteen — current players and legends, most of them standing on a base cut from game-used court.

This is the one shelf in the room where the person matters more than the team. A figure is a specific player, and a fan with three jerseys in the wardrobe still has only one favourite. Get that name right and very little else about this gift can go wrong. Get it wrong and the object has nowhere to sit.

The legends are the safer end if you are buying for somebody whose fandom predates your own — Magic, Iverson, Shaq. A person who watched those four play does not need the current roster explained to them, and will notice that you knew that.

The board on the back wall is the room's least obvious idea and its largest.

These are artworks on a backboard, 72 by 36 inches, each by a named artist — forty-two of them, no two the same. They hang as wall art rather than as memorabilia, and that is the whole point of the format: the shape reads as basketball while the surface reads as a print, so the piece works on a wall where a framed jersey would not.

It is not a small gift and it does not pretend to be. What it suits is the person who already owns everything in the other five bays, or a room that needs one large thing on a wall instead of several small ones.

Choose by the artwork rather than by the crest. Most of these are not about a team at all.

The row of cutaway balls on the ledge is the room's own work, not a product. Each one is a real basketball opened up to show what is under the surface — the bladder, the windings, the panels.

NBA Lab does not sell a ball, so this is one of the two pieces in the room that sends you to Amazon rather than to the partner's shop. What it offers is the ball itself, by size and by surface: 29.5 inch is the men's and college ball, 28.5 the women's and intermediate, 27.5 the youth size. Composite leather is the indoor court ball and rubber is the one that survives a driveway.

Buy on surface before brand. A good indoor ball used outdoors is ruined in a season, and an outdoor ball indoors simply feels wrong in the hand.

The left-hand tank holds a billiards table, leaned over and suspended in the fluid — the one piece of furniture in a room otherwise full of objects you can carry.

It is here as the room's largest joke about scale. Billiards by Brandt is a line NBA Lab carry rather than a shelf they keep stocked, so this one opens their collection instead of a single product: what is on it is whatever they have made, at the moment you look.

A table is the least spontaneous gift in this room by some distance. It is a room decision before it is a present — the size has to be chosen against the space it goes in, not against a budget.