Brian Scalabrine ended his NBA career in 2012 on the foot of an NBA bench, a cult hero known more for his everyman persona than his play.

Six years later, the league has changed, but the man has not.

The captain of the Ball Hogs of the BIG3, a summer league for retired players, Scalabrine takes in games from the same angle of the floor.

In seven appearances for the Ball Hogs, the “White Mamba” has averaged a single minute per game and just 1.4 points. But being the sixth member of a 3-on-3 team only adds to his legend, and he has no hard feelings about his role.

“Look, those guys are better than me,” Scalabrine recently said over the phone of his teammates. “I think Josh Childress is a really good player. I was playing a lot at the beginning, but it makes sense.”

The league was co-founded last year by Ice Cube and branded as a chance for fans to watch their favorite stars of the past. Players like Allen Iverson and Amar’e Stoudemire have graced the court, showing glimpses of why they were All-Stars in their younger years.

And then there is Scalabrine, no more talented than in his NBA years but also no less smart. Alongside head coach Rick Barry and co-captains Childress and DeShawn Stevenson, he runs the team and makes key decisions, providing the same dose of intangibles that kept him employed for 11 memorable seasons, in which he was a constant survivor while averaging just 13 minutes per game. He was part of the decision this year to draft former Pacer Andre Owens, who leads the team in assists.

“I knew after the first year that the way — what you have to do is you have to get guys that can defend their position and make plays,” said the second-year BIG3’er.

The Ball Hogs are just 1-6, which Scalabrine says serves as evidence of the league’s skill level.

“I don’t think that they fully understand how competitive it is,” Scalabrine said. “That it’s a league where guys are coming in trying to win, trying to win a championship. With a championship trophy, with money on the line, with a championship ring, with bragging rights, I don’t think they understand.”

The BIG3’s players may be old, creaky and slow. But they’re as intense as ever.

What the players lack in agility, they make up for in trash talking, with an “old-school mentality” encouraging the type of confrontation that the NBA shies away from.

“It’s before in the training camp, it’s in the back room in the locker room, on the floor,” Scalabrine said of the league’s epidemic. “The other game I played against Reggie Evans, the trash talking [was] so thick that he’s trash talking with Jason Maxiell, who wasn’t even playing against him, he’s on the bench. It’s just like everyone talks trash all the time.”

But according to the former Net, it’s not just the league’s competitive juices that lead to the mouth-running. It also has to do with the league’s unique format.

“3-on-3 is way more 1-on-1,” Scalabrine said. “Where in the NBA, rarely do you get those opportunities where one guy’s talking trash to another guy and busting him. … Just the game itself dictates more trash talking because you are on an island defensively, you do have the ball with a guy in front of you trying to score on you.”

The league has ridden that streetball identity to at least curiosity, if not relative success. Its second season debut on FS1 drew 921,000 viewers, and despite a dip since then, it has beaten the 2018 NBA Summer League in average ratings.

The BIG3 is popular not because of beautiful ball-movement or complex defensive schemes. It’s more relatable than the NBA, which players fans already are familiar with. You won’t see coaches (Gary Payton) berating opposing players in the NBA, or team captains like Scalabrine calmly accepting their lack of playing time.

That honesty has carved out a niche for the BIG3, so much so that Scalabrine now has Costco clerks telling him they prefer the old-man league.

“Unless they see it, when they hear about it, they think it’s more Harlem Globetrotters versus Washington Generals,” Scalabrine said. “And when they see it, they realize, actually, ‘This is the way I played growing up. I’d go to the park with my boys and we’d play 3-on-3.’ And this is very very similar to that. And until they see it, that’s what they miss out on.”