Showtime for the Straw Hat Pirates.
You’ve really got to hand it to creator Eiichiro Oda and the rest of the One Piece production team. For the 27 years since the pirate adventure tale began, they’ve managed to keep the series’ biggest secret under wraps, as we still don’t know the One Piece is.
However, it’s starting to feel like whatever the true nature of the fabled treasure is, it’s somewhere in Los Angeles. Last winter Luffy and his crew rolled into Sofi Stadium, occupying the venue as part of a collaboration with the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams during one of their regular season games. Now the Straw Hat Pirates are getting set for another voyage to the City of Angels, once again docking at a sports venue, as this time they’re sailing into the home of the Los Angeles Lakers.
As announced through the professional basketball team’s official Twitter account, One Piece and the Lakers will be joining forces for a game night collab, to be called One Piece Night, on February 28. To celebrate the alliance, the Lakers also shared a brand-new illustration of Luffy wearing the team’s iconic purple-and-gold uniform and also unveiled a shared One Piece/Lakers emblem.
▼ Luffy’s jersey number is 56, which can be read as “go-mu” in Japanese, referencing the Gomu gomu no Mi/Gum-Gum Fruit that gave him his stretchy, rubbery limbs.
More details will be announced in the lead-up to the game, but we can probably expect something similar to the collaboration with the Rams, with special crossover art displays and merch at the venue.
The Lakers’ opponent on February 28, incidentally, will be the Clippers, Los Angeles’ other professional basketball team, who were co-tenants of Crypto.com Arena with the Lakers for more than 20 years before moving to a new stadium in nearby city of Inglewood before the start of this season. With One Piece being part of a long tradition of shonen action anime/manga where the line between friendship and intense rivalry is often blurred, though, you could argue that the Lakers taking on their former stadium-mates is a fitting occasion for the collaboration.
Source: Twitter/@Lakers via Anime News Network/Ken Iikura-Gross
Images: Twitter/@Lakers
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
Follow Casey on Twitter as he wonders if Shaq would have called himself “The Big Chopper” if the Lakers had done a One Piece night while he was still playing.