Clippers star Blake Griffin: MVP of the Nicholas Sparks book club

Basketball might be everything for Clippers power forward Blake Griffin, but everyone has to have a hobby. For Griffin, it’s sipping Chardonnay while leading a Nicholas Sparks book club.

That was the premise of a skit on Monday night’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” anyway, which doubled as an advertisement for “The Best of Me,” a new film based on Sparks’ 2011 novel. The movie, starring James Marsden and Michelle Monaghan, opens Friday.

The skit features Griffin leading a book club discussion that includes NBA players Matt Barnes (also of the Clippers), Chandler Parsons (Dallas Mavericks) and Iman Shumpert (New York Knicks). Griffin kicks things off by asking “Who else wept?” The other players sheepishly raise their hands.

But like many NBA games, the meeting leads to a fight after Parsons admits he found the book “a little prosaic.” Griffin has to restrain Barnes and call in Sparks himself to referee the fight.

The skit is lighthearted and goofy, and comes at a good time for Sparks, who is being sued for discrimination by the former headmaster at the school the author founded. The suit alleges that Sparks secretly holds racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views, and forced the headmaster out of his job.