Everybody flubs a line now and then, but to flub one regarding basketball in Indiana was awkward.
As a minister I get numerous opportunities to louse up lines in public. It happens.
Basketball ring is unusual in that there’s no natural alternative phrase that would make your brain/tongue come up with ‘ring’.
It’s like something you’d expect a foreign speaker of English to say as they hunted for an appropriate English word to describe what they could see in their mind’s eye.
Basketball as a 3rd language