Chicago

An otherwise ordinary basketball fan named Alex recognized someone walking into a recent Chicago Bulls game and thought: Wait, is that Dikembe Mutombo? Then something else occurred to him.

“I thought about running after him and asking about cats,” he said. “I’m really regretting that I didn’t.”

Alex is a 34-year-old radio producer who enjoys cooking, gardening and meditation. He’s also the anonymous owner of a website that, somehow, has become a cult hit in basketball circles. It’s called NBA Catwatch.

Almost every night of the NBA season, Alex sits down at his computer, flicks on a basketball game, pours a tall glass of ginger ale and gets to work. He spends more than 10 hours each week trying to answer an important question: Who are the NBA players with cats?