In basketball, our Campbellian instincts to declare and venerate heroes work in overdrive. The best of the best, the Godzillas of the game, overwhelm everything and become the protagonists of the NBA, dictating the flow of every game and dazzling audiences in person, on TV, and in highlight packages everywhere. In the 1950s, it was George Mikan, the first tall guy to ever play basketball. The ’60s were the story of Bill Russell, an ornery political radical who invented the modern game and left Jerry West broken and humiliated every summer. The ’70s were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s time, which sort of annoyed him because he is the exact kind of person who finds all of this very stupid. (He’s right.)
The ’80s sang the ballad of Bird and Magic, a rivalry that captured the hearts of a nation and also created a non-violent-but-still-kind-of-icky outlet for the racial tensions of an America slowly sliding into late capitalism. The ’90s, of course, were all Michael Jordan. For a second at the beginning of the aughts, it seemed like Allen Iverson was the league’s new protagonist, but he fell off fast and was supplanted by Kobe Bryant, a toxic nepo baby with a flair for personal brand building.
Since then, the NBA has been intractably wired through LeBron James. It’s not just a story thing; he helped his agent become incredibly powerful, altered the way teams deal with great players, taught everyone how to threaten and cajole their squads into entering win-now mode. He loves it—loves hearing about himself on TV, loves giving interviews, loves posting stuff online, and just loves attention. If he could, he would be the NBA’s protagonist forever.
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But he can’t and he isn’t; not anymore. He’s just too old now, and while he’s still a great player, his teams have to “watch his minutes” and “win less than they used to” because he doesn’t have the same power on the court that he used to. LeBron was once Odysseus sailing the seas, but now he is Odysseus sitting at the tall ships—cool, I suppose, but trapped in the broader Iliad of the league, forgotten when Achilles clogs the river with blood in the playoffs.
We need a new NBA protagonist. OK, we don’t need one, but we are destined to make one. But it’s unclear who that will be, since the last five seasons have ended with five different teams on top of the league—something that has only happened three times in NBA history (in 1954-58, 1971-75, and 1976-80). The league inspires its order in dynastic structures, but we just haven’t seen them lately. No one is dominating, claiming the role of admiral in the honorable ship brawl of the playoffs. But surely, someone will soon. Below, see the current candidates.
Nikola Jokic
Jokic won two of the last three league MVPs and, based purely on in-season production, probably should have won last year as well. He just won the NBA title and is maybe the most entertaining player since Jordan. He scores from everywhere, assists from everywhere, and wins like it’s nothing.
But if he is the new man of the era, it has to be said: That’s pretty weird! I just compared him to Jordan, and even though I stand by my statement from two sentences ago, I have to admit that it’s a weird thing to say and I felt weird saying it. Jordan was a middle-class everyman guard from North Carolina; charismatic on television and competitive on the court. He floated around the court like someone not quite human, but also always appeared to be smoking himself to the filter night after night.
Jokic is Jordan’s opposite. He is a seven-foot-tall Serbian center and cart-horse-racing enthusiast who is neither traditionally charismatic nor handsome. He plays on the ground, dominating through strength and guile instead of otherworldly athleticism. He is probably a competitive person—players don’t tend to be this good without it—but he doesn’t play the role of some “driven to perfection” psycho like Jordan did. He doesn’t even like being in America; he gets back to Serbia, and his horses, as much as humanly possible.
If Jokic is the new protagonist of the NBA, he is a very strange one; maybe the strangest we have ever seen. It’s like seeing a movie where Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a handsome action lead: Sure, it’s awesome, but what exactly is happening here?
Giannis Antetokounmpo
Also a two-time MVP and also an NBA champion, he’s traditionally charismatic, and one of the best pure athletes in the history of the game. His story is incredible: Once a lanky son of Nigerian refugees living on the fringe in Eurozone-crisis Greece, he lucked onto a basketball club in his late teens and quickly developed into a decent NBA prospect. Then, when he was actually in the league, he stacked on a bunch of muscle, developed a little handle, devoted himself to defense, and proceeded to absolutely dominate everyone in his way. The league’s best two-way player by a mile.
If anything, he’s the dude who most resembles the new NBA: a global league with players excelling and dominating from all over the world. And yet, you can’t really SEE yourself in him, you know? He’s out there doing stuff a 10-year-old child could never DREAM of doing: picking off a pass, dribbling the whole length of the court in three dribbles, rising from nine feet and slamming it down. Catching it on the move, knifing through several defenders, rising over three defenders and slamming it down. Catching lobs from across the court. Swallowing someone on the perimeter and blocking a big man at the rim on the same play.
Look: Either Shaquille O’Neal or Tim Duncan were the best NBA players of the aughts. But Shaq seemed like he was two guys fused into one, and Duncan didn’t really give a fuck about what someone on TV thought about him. They let Kobe step in and take up the mantle. Giannis has that Shaq quality of seeming like an impossible physical construct and, though he’s more open and in the world than Duncan, he also seems content on playing in Milwaukee for his entire career, so long as the checks clear. There is neither an everyman energy nor a call to greatness in Giannis. He is more like a fact of life, thundering into his inferiors night after night.
Stephen Curry
Someday, someone will say that LeBron’s era was actually Steph Curry’s era. They won’t be right, per se; I was there and people talked about LeBron more. But they will have a point: Curry’s gunning off the dribble behind the three-point arc changed the tactical shape of the game more than anyone in the three-point era.
He’s still great, and his team, the Golden State Warriors, are still good. But he’s on the other side of the arrow’s descent, and it will take a miracle for the Warriors to be great. He would have to win more titles in the immediate future while also getting his nose broken, mid-game, bleeding all over his jersey, and having it captured in an iconic photo in order to seriously challenge LeBron’s claim on the immediate past, or some enterprising youth’s claim on the immediate future. Fated to live and play in a netherspace, I suppose.
Victor Wembanyama
The most hyped draft prospect since LeBron, “Wemby” is a little like an unholy combination of Giannis, Jokic, Anthony Davis, and Slenderman. When he played in the French pro league, he would block a three-point shot, grab the board himself, dribble up the court, and drill a three-pointer, all on his lonesome.
It’s possible he will become completely unstoppable in short order and stay that way for many years to come. Unfortunately, he’s only played three NBA games, so the sample set is probably not large enough to make any big declarations. But still, please know: Someday, someone might read this and say, “Damn, Corbin looks like an IDIOT right now.”
Jimmy Butler
He declared war on the entire world just to get into the NBA, then kept declaring war when he got in the league and found out everyone who ever played for a big college program was a fraud. He’s not personally good enough or successful to be declared the singular protagonist of the NBA, but he provides a template for someone else who could.
Imagine: a 21-year-old shooting guard, six-foot-five, not a great athlete, taken 30th. He is on the team with a big-time college player, 20 years old. He quickly exceeds his teammate through sheer force of will, and publicly beefs with him in their second year together. His teammate gets traded for a handful of veterans, the team improves around him, wins the title, wins two more titles, and enshrines future-Jimmy as a member of the elite of the elite. Now, this is not what Butler did, per se, but it’s kind of close, and I think if someone else really pulled it off, they would probably be declared that decade’s Hero of Basketball in short order. Watch this space!
Jayson Tatum
Jayson Tatum is good at pretty much everything on a basketball court. He is also boring as hell and, since he plays for the Boston Celtics, everyone wants him to lose every game. The only people who want him to be the league’s protagonist are the glut of Celtics fans who work in NBA media, and because of those people’s inane scribblings on the matter, I had to mention him.
Jamal Murray
This column is not about Murray specifically, but about an idea he represents. Murray is Jokic’s running partner in Denver and the team’s second-best player. He has never made an all-star team, but he is very skilled and smart, and he plays brilliantly in a team concept that feeds from Jokic’s prodigious talent.
Seeing recent parity in the NBA landscape, I pose the question: What if the protagonist era is actually over? If the Suns, the Celtics, or one or two other contenders won the big one this year, it would be the second time in league history that six different teams won the title in consecutive seasons. It would be the most parity the league has shown since the 1970s.
What if, in that world, the narrative as we have known it is dead? What if our hero is not The Hero of a Thousand Faces, but the Proletarian Stand Strong Together, the collective energy of basketball played well, instead of the inane structure I have exhibited and promoted here today? Should the game itself rise up and plant Jamal Murray’s visage in the mountain, declare basketball stolen from Michael Jordan (The God of Man) and claimed by All Ballers Everywhere (The God of Men)? Can you see it? Can you see the new dream, living on the horizon?
