Steven Adams Hilariously Predicts GTA VI Will Impact NBA Performance League-Wide

Steven Adams has issued perhaps the funniest warning of the 2026-27 NBA season. Don’t be surprised if the quality of basketball suddenly drops across the league in November.

Speaking at the Houston Rockets media day, Adams shockingly predicted that the November 19th release of Grand Theft Auto 6 will have NBA players and coaches so distracted that it could affect their performance drastically.

“I will say, you guys should anticipate November. The performance of the league, league-wide, GTA is dropping. So look at NFL, look at all the leagues, and watch them plummet, mate.”

“Just for the month of November, performance is going to go down. It should come back up, though. Most of the boys will get it done, but hopefully they finish the game. Coaching as well, by the way.”

“The coaching staffs are going to be horrendous, mate, just for November, but it should bounce back in December, hopefully.”

It was obvious that Adams was joking, but the enormous anticipation surrounding GTA 6 makes the prediction especially funny.

Rockstar Games has officially scheduled the game for November 19, 2026, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Pre-orders officially opened globally on June 25, while players will be able to preload the game beginning on November 12.

And calling the hype enormous might actually be underselling it.

GTA 5 was originally launched all the way back in September 2013, meaning players have waited more than 13 years for a new mainline installment of GTA.

By the time GTA 6 arrives, Rockstar will be returning players to Vice City, with protagonists Jason Duvall and Lucia Caminos in a story spread across the fictional state of Leonida.

The financial expectations are just out of this world. Gaming analytics firm Newzoo has projected GTA 6 could generate as much as $5.2 billion in global sales by the end of its launch week, just showing the unprecedented commercial expectations surrounding the game.

Reports online have also frequently placed the game’s total development and marketing costs at over a billion dollars, potentially making it one of the most expensive entertainment projects ever produced. But Rockstar and parent company Take-Two have not definitively released a budget, so the widely calculated billion-dollar figure should be treated as an estimate rather than a fact.

The hype looks only more intense as the launch approaches. Rockstar released an extended look at the game in August, and analysts have described its launch as potentially enormous for Take-Two’s bookings.

And that brings everything back to Adams.

NBA players regularly discuss gaming as one of their favorite ways to spend downtime, particularly while traveling during an exhausting 82-game season. GTA 6 arrives roughly a month into the NBA schedule and therefore could consume plenty of free time around the league.

Whether anyone actually loses sleep and games because of it is yet to be seen. But if shooting percentages miraculously collapse after November 19th, Adams has already provided his explanation, and according to him, fans should not panic.

Players and coaches should come back to their normal selves by December.