You get home from a day at the office and find a Netflix crew in your living room.
This is what Domantas Sabonis has experienced during the past year. Only for the six-foot-ten Lithuanian American basketball player, “the office” is Golden 1 Center, synonymous with purple-infused jerseys and crazed fans chanting “Light the Beam!”, a rallying cry in reference to the 1,000 watts of RGB laser power that radiates until midnight with each subsequent Sacramento Kings victory.
Sabonis, the Kings’ starting center and a three-time NBA All-Star, is one of five main cast members in Netflix’s sports docuseries “Starting 5.” It follows the lives of five players — LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics, Jimmy Butler of the Miami Heat and Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves — during the 2023-24 NBA season.
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“Every time we went to the park, I had six, seven cameramen following me,” Sabonis says. Netflix did an excellent job of ensuring the same crew was assigned to his family, he said. “You kind of forget the cameras are there. You’re in dad mode and you’re just taking care of your kids.”
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Showrunner Peter J. Scalettar says the creative team behind “Starting 5” knew the basketball storyline alone was insufficient to captivate audiences. The crew, he explains, shot episodes with the intention of breaking through the media trained facade possessed by players to find underlying emotional subtext.
Series director Trishtan Williams adds that featuring Sabonis’ wife, Shashana Rosen, as much as possible and focusing on family dynamics allowed the creatives to discover threads of vulnerability.
Williams details the moment Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green stomped on Sabonis’ chest during a 2023 playoff game. “Starting 5” captures the scene, along with Rosen’s memory of the incident — she was pregnant at the time.
“You hear Shashana saying ‘Oh my goodness. He’s at home, he’s on ventilators. He can’t breathe,'” Williams says. “I think that’s a part of humanizing the players, to show the world that (they) are going through a lot.”
The son of former NBA star and Hall of Famer Arvydas Sabonis, Domantas admits, as a child, he had no idea how great of a basketball player his dad was. It wasn’t until looking up late ’90s hoop highlights on YouTube, he recalls, that his father’s legacy sunk in.
“He’s basketball royalty,” Scalettar says of what made Domantas an intriguing subject to document. “Him being a second-generation NBA star…there’s some interesting parallels from a storytelling perspective.”
Much of the series revolves around Sabonis’ struggles as a European to fit with the NBA and American culture. Despite his father being a big international star, Domantas has been traded and forced to relocate his family three times; this past season he failed to make the NBA All-Star team despite leading the league in triple-doubles.
In brand and likeness, Sabonis is not flashy compared to some of the other top stars at the pinnacle of the sport today. Sabonis has never starred in an Adam Sandler movie like Edwards. Unlike Butler, he doesn’t have a budding bromance with Colombian pop star J Balvin. He’s not on any video game covers like Tatum. And he is not LeBron James. In “Starting 5,” he is none of these things. But he is depicted as a leader who gifts Christmas presents to every employee in the Kings organization. He is a father who dresses up as Big Bird to play with his son Tiger. By the end of the 10-episode sereis, a portrait emerges of Sabonis as a layered canvas of raw emotion.
Domas is driven by his need for greater career recognition, asking “‘Why don’t I get the love that everyone else gets?'” Scalettar says. “Even feeling some of that from him (is) pretty revealing for these superstar athletes to show that level of vulnerability.”
