Here’s something that will read like a riddle: When do you know the future has arrived?
Fitting, on the eve of a new year, to have one foot in the future and one eye still cast over the shoulder, looking back at the past. I value New Year’s Eve for this liminal space it lends, the opportunity to pause and consider the year that was and the one to come without a sense yet of its pressures. In-between spaces like this are rare in life, and if or when you find them, are nice not to rush out of.
Basketball has its liminal spaces too, though they’re a bit more rare. The time right after the Draft, when the next season’s rookies-to-be have their teams but no hulking expectations. The brief stretch between the regular season and the playoffs is another — the brackets set, but no competition commenced. It’s easier to tell in these situations when the future arrives, when the liminal space shuts.
But back to the riddle. Under the surface of this season’s NBA discourse, there’s been a persistent hum. With the inevitable aging of the game’s superstars comes the question of who’s next?
What confuses me is that I’ve mainly seen it asked in worry and incredulity, the implication being that there’s no one obvious, or ready, to fill those well-worn shoes. All it takes is a cursory glance at the season’s standings, now firmly set as we shift past the quarter mark, to see that the future is here — and it’s been humming for a while now.
The top four teams in the East and West all boast talent, skill, and star-power. Luka Doncic, Jayson Tatum, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Ja Morant, Donovan Mitchell and Karl-Anthony Towns are the most established in terms of their fan familiarity, but Darius Garland, Paolo Banchero, Jalen Williams, and Jalen Green are already on their way to being as regularly recited — and that’s really it.
When the skill and flare of an NBA athlete proves to have staying power, to dazzle consistently, the rest comes down to name recognition, which comes through repetition.
We’ve been saying the same big names for a long time now. LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo — their names conjure stats and highlight reels in our heads, and they’re automatically in any conversation about the state of the game. We know by heart their unique contributions to it. Part of this comes from reporting, established media have the longest (and most familiar) relationships with these players, they can count on access to them and in turn write stories knowing the appetite is there. The appetite is there, in part, because the legacy outlets that existed alongside these players as they ascended into superstars were formidable. You don’t need to be a media critic to recognize that many of these outlets have been hollowed out for profit by new owners, shut down completely, or have switched to serving audiences short-form “click bait” content and video that favours more opportunities for ad revenue.
The reason the NBA’s next generation of stars haven’t yet turned into household names doesn’t rest solely on these gaps in media — I’d argue that local media for each market is doing the lion’s share of storytelling on these players — but media, and national media, is how the majority of fans consume and familiarize themselves with NBA basketball. It’s an ecosystem, every part is tied together.
The solution, or one of them, is to be vocal. Broadcasters and the league care about the flattened metric of ratings, but they also pay attention to audience feedback. While you can still write in to a city paper or leave feedback for a podcast to comment on coverage, the two-way channels have narrowed on a national scale. It’s partially by design, so ESPN et al can tell the audience what it wants to see, but all these places have press and PR departments.
Where does all this fit into our earlier riddle? We like to be told when the future is here, even though we are, every minute, stepping into it ourselves. We can’t know when a sea-change is happening; there are small, perceptible shifts but most of it we only recognize in retrospect. The sooner we shift our language to talk about the future of the NBA — the players, people, whose names we already know but treat as secondary — as the present, the faster we usher in its next chapter.
