With the NBA finals concluded and the NBA draft now upon us, I find myself once more living through a Tom Brady-like nightmare of sitting at home by the phone on selection night, waiting for a call that will never come. I may only be 5’11” (six-feet flat if you include charm) and have trouble dribbling, but it would seem that this lack of physical gifts or basketball talent of any kind is only part of why my applications for first-round pick have been universally rejected. In the quasi-fascist world of athletics, where the sublimation of the individual for the good of the team is paramount, there is a surprising and growing trend in which the name on the back of the jersey might actually mean as much as the one on the front.
In a draft class that’s already being discussed as one of the worst ever (and still I get nothing!), there is one gold-plated name that has cut through the noise and stood out from the crowd: Bronny James. The name-bearing heir-apparent to King LeBron James, Bronny put up an unimpressive freshman year at USC (before which he admittedly suffered a cardiac episode), but he’s hardly the first USC kid from Brentwood to leave school early to follow their famous father into the family business. And he is nonetheless now far and away the leader in share of bets placed on him to go #1 at BetMGM, at 30%–a full 11 percentage points ahead of UConn forward Donovan Clingan in second. This is basically a meme stock at this point, with frat boys everywhere looking at that +20000 odds line–Clingan: +600–and thinking “f*ck it, Lebron controls the league anyway, Bronny probably will go number one,” and dropping down a ten-spot for the hell of it. And while this certainly won’t happen (note: This is not gambling advice), it still serves to highlight the fact that, to paraphrase a barb once launched at famous surnamist Teddy Kennedy, if his name were Lebron Raymone, instead of Lebron Raymone James Jr. his candidacy would be a joke. Hopefully the Lakers’ inevitable second-round selection of Junior doesn’t drive the team off the bridge.
But he isn’t the only one. In the 78-year history of the NBA, just over 100 so-called second-generation players have entered the league. This was something of a rarity in the association’s early days, with zero second-generation players from the league’s founding in the 1940s until the 1960s when two such athletes signed with franchises. And in the four decades after, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, 29 players whose fathers had played set foot on the hardwood. In just the quarter-century since 2000 though, that number has already nearly tripled, to 76 such players. Some of these are familiar names, like Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, whose fathers’ careers are part of their story, or Gary Payton II and Tim Hardaway Jr. who have their dad’s names, but there are also some unexpected names like Damontis Sabonis whose dad was, evidently, a star in Europe and played in the NBA or Joe Young who–sorry who? Additionally, that number doesn’t include athletes who had a parent compete professionally in something other than basketball, such as Mike Conley, whose father won Olympic gold in the triple jump, or who had not a father but a grandfather in the Association, like Marvin Bagley. And it’s not just players either, but coaches, too: Title-winning head coach Mike Malone of the Denver Nuggets is himself the son of longtime coach Brendan Malone, to name one such example.
This isn’t necessarily so shocking, but it is notable because it cuts against the grain of one of the most fundamental pillars of athletics: That anybody, no matter their background or what the scouts say about them or the fact they got cut from JV in ninth grade, can make it to the league and succeed if they’re willing to work for it. Instead, we have a situation developing in which access to one of the highly-coveted professional roster spots depends to some meaningful extent on coming from the right family. Of course, seven-footers tend to beget seven-footers, and at the end of the day, you can’t teach height as they say. And while nobody who can’t really hoop is going to make an NBA team just as a favor to daddy, other than perhaps Bronny, this whole trend brings back to mind something I heard famous Sunday Night Football commentator and former player Chris Collinsworth say on a broadcast a few years ago: “The NFL is all about relationships.” Chris, I’ve wondered about that for a while now, so if you’d ever come on the blog, I’d love to discuss it (One of Collinsworth’s sons, it’s worth mentioning, is himself a broadcaster on NBC). Collinsworth said this during a discussion about the overlapping lineages of NFL coaches Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan, both of whom themselves come from football families. People these days love to comment on “coaching trees,” the professional networks linking signal-callers together, but it’s possibly the family tree that we should be looking at instead.
We live in a democracy in which all citizens are, like in our sports leagues, supposed to be able to achieve whatever their talents and efforts enable them. But in recent decades, this social fabric has completely decayed into two distinct camps of haves and have nots. Now, the best predictor of one’s own future economic outcome is the results of one’s father’s. The NBA has always been more exclusive than getting into Harvard or landing a job on the trading desk at Goldman Sachs, but unlike those institutions that seemed at times to function hereditarily like the House of Lords, athletics is supposed to be a House of Commons where members from all corners of our society can participate. Youth sports costs, though, have risen dramatically in recent years, classing out many of the poorer families that could most benefit, educationally and financially, from the windfall of modern sports. The sort of families, though, that have the resources, talent, and inclination to invest the ever-increasing amount of time and money into getting junior to the show are probably the ones where senior made it there first.
All of which is to say I don’t know who the first pick in this year’s draft will be. But if I were a betting man, I’d put a nice chunk of change on the #1 overall selection in the 2050 draft being the son of somebody who’s already in the league.
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