The True Story Behind Myles Turner’s Dedication to His Legos Craft—from Childhood to the Pacers
Less than 24 hours after dropping 20 points, 12 boards and two blocks in the Pacer’s second game of the regular season, Myles Turner is back on the hardwood. Well, not that type of court. One of his own creation: an ’03 Lego NBA Ultimate Arena Set.
It’s the latest build in the two-time Blocks champion’s overtly extensive Lego collection: the set allows users to shoot baskets with Lego minifigures via exclusive spring pieces placed in the figurine’s legs. The 1.5-inch figures resemble the League’s stars from two decades ago, including Tracy McGrady, Allen Iverson, Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Antoine Walker, Shaquille O’Neal, Vince Carter, Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant. They are all represented in their respective ’03-04 uniforms.
“I actually just finished this, the one from when I was a kid,” Turner says of the Lego NBA Set. “I just got it on eBay and I’m like man this is nostalgia, this is one of the first sets I ever had. I knocked that out within three-four hours, put all that together. I’ve got a little mini-figure of myself, I just take the legs off and put myself on the court and flick it back.”
Those short four hours were a full-circle moment for Turner. Merging two of his greatest passions is a reality a younger version of himself would be baffled to see realized. As a kid, Turner’s parents prevented him from playing video games frequently, and going over to his friend’s house for a Halo 3 marathon was a bit like walking on eggshells. Thankfully, friends like Robert had a backroom stocked full of buckets of Legos.
“So while they were playing video games, I would always go to the back room and start building stuff and just make all my little imaginations and all this stuff come to real life,” Turner tells SLAM. “ I just never really looked back. My dad’s the one who really introduced me to it. And I kind of took it and made it my own.”
Instead of staring at a screen with a controller in hand, Turner’s father wanted his son to have a more hands-on approach to his burgeoning creativity. The answer was Bionicles. Housed within a cylindrical plastic container, the Lego robot figures captivated Turner and pre-teens alike for over two decades before being discontinued in 2010.
People think it’s gimmicky having Legos around the house. I actually do this shit bruh.
— Pacers’ Myles Turner
To accompany his biomechanical collection, Turner built all types of vessels; from pirate ships and rockets to ships from movies or shows he was enamored with as a kid. Except, he wasn’t using the step-by-step construction booklet that typically accompanies a Lego set. Turner was building his creations straight from scratch and memory.
The Pacers center sees several parallels between his dominance on the hardwood and his ability to create his own Lego constructions. His ethos is creative, determined, precise, and exacting. He’s the conductor and the pieces are his orchestra, much like how the paint and the ball are his symphony.
“I think of myself when I’m on the basketball floor like I’m an artist and what I do on the floor itself is my art, it’s how I create. The stuff you work on in the gym, in the lab in the offseason, is the stuff that you put on display when you’re actually in the middle of an NBA game,” Turner tells SLAM. “It’s kind of the same thing (with Legos). All the stuff that you come up with in your head, you’re able to take a few pieces and throw something together. And it’s like, ‘Damn I really did that.’ It’s something to be proud of.”
From the minds of kids on Christmas day to professional builders on social media, every Lego fan has at one point pondered the idea of crafting a Lego City that sprawls across various tables. As a self-proclaimed Lego BricksConnoisseur—peep his IG bio—and a Lego VIP Member, Myles’ immense connection to the brand wouldn’t be complete without his own form of a clad-brick city landscape.
“People think it’s gimmicky having Legos around the house. I actually do this shit bruh,” Turner says. “It’s fun for me, I do this shit all the time.”
Next summer, Turner plans to fully expand his own Lego City to an area in his Austin, Texas home that’s more accommodating to the expansive metropolitan area. Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, the Daily Bugle from Spider-Man, a windmill turbine and the 6,000-piece Hogwarts Castle from Harry Potter—which he’s currently in the midst of—will each connect in their own unique way.
“There’s a whole bunch of little things that I want to do to make them all come together,” Turner tells SLAM. “That’s the beauty of it because you can make it all your own. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s guide or regime, and that’s the fun part about this.”
Amidst the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, Legos became both a popular pastime and collector’s item for millions of us stuck at home. Met by the rise of platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, Lego creators began to showcase their extensive set-ups and jaw-dropping collections. However, Myles had already established his brick fandom well before Lego saw a social resurgence. In 2018 he posted a timelapse of him completing the 2,000-piece Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer over seven-straight hours.
The long grey Empire ship is just one of the many vessels in Turner’s armada of Lego constructions. Walk up the jet-black spiral staircase in Turner’s Austin home and you’ll find a sleek metal and glass shelf outfitted with Lego versions of the Death Star, a Clone Wars Gunship, Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing, the Millennium Falcon, the Batwing and Batmobile. The shelf sits tucked behind a wall that also displays a two-foot-tall Lego Mario figure, a nod to Turner’s extensive video game fandom.
Directly ahead of the upstairs entrance sits further display cases that showcase a detailed look at Cinderella’s Castle, a WWE belt, the Home Alone house and the beginnings of his aforementioned Lego City. Hundreds of exclusive and highly valuable minifigures, like the original $3,000 Boba Fett figure, are stacked in neat rows behind a translucent plexiglass case on another table.
Soon, he’ll be adding a foot-tall Lego R2-D2 and AT-AT Walker, which he holds up on our Zoom call showcasing four fully complete legs and a half-built chassis.
“The biggest thing for me in this Lego thing is, it’s not gimmicky. It’s not like I’m just trying to go out here and get a sponsorship. This is actually something I love and I’m passionate about,” Turner tells SLAM. “The ingenuity that goes behind all of it, the imagination that people have and just the different lanes that you open up and different worlds that you can open up stepping into this space is unreal. I have a lot of fun with that, man. It’s been it’s been real dope.”
While each of the latter ships is extravagant in its own right, Turner credits his most difficult build to the 9,000-piece 1:200 scale replica of The Titanic – which occupies the top-most section of the “ship shelf”.
Garnering over 145,000 likes on X (formerly known as Twitter) immediately after its completion in March of 2022, Turner was quickly alerted to a mistake within his prize possession. One of the four yellow and black smokestacks was facing the opposite direction, a misstep that Turner has left alone to this day as an endearing personalized detail. “You know what bruh, I’m not about to go back and fix this. Like the Titanic didn’t work the first time in real life, so this is my version of it,” Turner tells us with a laugh.
Given the vast amount of sets he’s built, Turner is more than acclimated to backtracking a few pages here and there for corrections. Over the years he’s also become used to the solitary construction process for his builds and creations. It wasn’t until recently that Turner began letting his girlfriend join him during builds, tag-teaming a custom 2,500 piece-by-piece image of his poster on Giannis Antetokounmpo from the 2022-23 season. The process, growth in routine, and intricacies of the latter have all become ingrained in the Pacer’s big man.
So when Myles’ mother and team gifted him with a life-size version of himself as Darth Vader made entirely out of Legos, he was instantly taken aback. Constructed by professional Lego builder Ekow Nimakoj, “Darth Myles” stands at 7’3 composed of over 100,000 pieces. The statue took roughly 716 hours to complete in early June of last year.
“When they actually showed me that I was dumbfounded. I was like ‘Yo this is like this is amazing. This is sick. No one’s gonna have anything like this. I can make this the centerpiece of my house,’ Turner tells SLAM. “Whether you like Legos or not, you’re gonna look at this and be like, ‘Oh yeah, this is dope.’ You know what I mean? It doesn’t matter what you’re into.”
While we conversed, Turner fiddled with a few small dimensional pieces from the half-built AT-AT Walker, rolling the pieces around in his giant palms like peas. Booklets are sprawled out across the cherrywood desk he sits at, beckoning his attention to the number of unfinished projects he still has to dive into. There’s a neatness in the chaos, a fortress of solitude. Amidst the thralls of the regular season or coming back home to Indy after a four-game road trip, Legos have become a form of meditation for the Pacers center.
“I can have a great game, or I can have a bad game, but once I come in here, once I’m in my little space I just tune everything out and get my music going, I’m sitting here and I just build bruh. I don’t really think about anything else in the world, I’m in my own space, if you will. And it’s a good little mental reset for me because like I said, no one’s bothering me. Sometimes I put my phone on Do Not Disturb. I’m literally sitting here, in my own world, doing my thing. And that comes in a lot of different forms for people,” Turner tells SLAM.
In the 6-11 center’s case, watching small inconsequential pieces come together to form something magnificent is a therapeutic process. Carving out time to visit cities for stops at Lego Stores or Beyond The Brick locations is Turner’s self-care. So what would his younger self think if he saw it all?
“He’d be dumbfounded, he wouldn’t believe it. It’s one of those things where when I was younger, basketball was fun for me but I never saw myself making it this far,” Turner tells SLAM. “Now you look at it, I’ve literally changed so many people’s lives around me, I’ve changed my family’s lives, I’ve changed a whole bunch of my friends (lives), people that I work with. Looking at it from that point of view, when I’m that young I don’t think I would’ve been able to fathom what I was able to put together in less than ten years.”
Photos via Myles Turner.
