Solution to Basketball

Answers in this round:

INTEL MOTHERBOARD
LEWIS CARROLL
SECOND GRAND ALLIANCE
YOSHIMITSU
PANASONIC Q

The name of a fictional character can be found as a substring of each of the answers (this is slightly hinted at by the word “characters” in the flavortext). Each of the characters is notably non-human and is a monster of some sort.

Each of these characters also has a distinctive color, and it turns out that these 5 colors exactly match those of the villainous Monstars in the classic basketball film Space Jam. The Space Jam aha is also mildly hinted at by the jersey designs, which are from the 90s (specifically the 1993–94 season). In the film, each of the Monstars steals the talent of a different NBA player, and those 5 players belong to the teams on the given jerseys.

This lets us match up the jerseys in the puzzle to NBA players, with one caveat: there are two Hornets players, and two of the four Hornets jerseys in the puzzle are smaller, so those two should correspond to Muggsy Bogues, who is notably the shortest player to ever play in the NBA.

For extraction, we find the value of X on each jersey so that the number matches the player’s actual jersey number. We use the jersey numbers seen in the film, or equivalently, in the 1993–94 season. Indexing these values of X into their corresponding answers gives the solution SQUARE BALL (not to be confused with air ball, a more normal reason for missed shots).