Comedian Sam Morrill has a joke about growing up. “[People have] a baby,” he says, “and we’re like: ‘it’s a miracle.’ Then it grows up and we’re like: ‘nevermind.’” The joke could easily be re-written to describe the arc of young NBA players. On draft night, they dress for glory and weep for the cameras with their families. It’s a bunch of American dreams come true. Give it a few years, though, and those dreams cost more and more to maintain. Podcasters and pundits now readily refer to rising contract numbers as nightmares, instead, as the player’s career whittles into something more strained, ambiguous, and coldly transactional.
Only a select few shake off this harsh transition, and go on to get everything they want: individual and team success, every dollar available, and respect from peers, media, and fans. Everyone else has to choose between these things, and the majority go for the money. Who wouldn’t? It’s not totally a personal choice, anyway. These young men employ a lot of people; they’re companies. And they’re only temporarily part of a profitable machine that will chew their bodies up before spitting them out. Most NBA careers last less than a decade, so they’ve got to extract maximum income from the system, at a sprint, before the system is quickly done with them too.
A lot of sourness develops along the fast path from wide-eyed job placement to the usually reluctant moment of retirement. Fantasy rot, more surgeries than most people have in a lifetime, and the bell curve regression to less and less money. Zach LaVine has yet to experience the latter phenomenon, but at 29 years old he already knows the first two well. The big money he earned in 2022 has cost him his comfort and reputation. It would be a bit much to say that he is a pariah as a man or a player, but as an “asset”—that thing you must become, for the money—he certainly is one.
The Chicago Bulls want to trade LaVine, and LaVine wants them to trade him. But efforts at such a thing appear to be at an impasse, as both parties wait out the long tumbleweed phase of the offseason to see if a market develops. LaVine is not one of the aforementioned “select few,” so in his case, this awkward liminal state is an important part of what he’s been paid for. In a league with a necessarily complex contract bazaar, he is one of its more difficult chunks of arbitrage. You would probably accept his place for $215 million, too. But this part of the story would still be a knife to your sense of self and pride.
In the best case scenario for LaVine, the resulting wound could both fuel him and heal spectacularly as he makes everyone remember how he earned that number in the first place, aiding a contender next season with efficient scoring and transformative athleticism. The prestige of saying “don’t call it a comeback,” to a room full of reporters, and the first chance of his career to keep playing basketball into May. That glimmering notion is surely somewhere in his heart, and in that of his agent’s. But the money will come to them either way, and the money comes conditionally—it always does. And the most important condition of the paychecks, for LaVine, seems increasingly to be that he will not get to achieve his dreams.
There is another way, though. In a much-debated choice, likely to have wild ramifications, Jalen Brunson agreed to leave $113 million on the table in his new contract extension with the New York Knicks. He’ll be making less than LaVine, and many more players he’s better than. But unlike LaVine, and unlike most players paid more than him, Brunson is very much living his dream. With the Knicks, he shares a workplace with his father and three of his best friends, all teammates from his college years at Villanova. And he does this while lighting the most historic arena in the sport, Madison Square Garden, on fire. He’s the most beloved player on his team in decades, in the NBA’s largest market.
He’ll be playing for a championship next year, too. The Knicks’ trade for Mikal Bridges, the fourth of the Villanova quartet, surrounds Brunson with even more length and defense. There’s no better two-way complement to his clinical, bravura scoring dances in the lane than the armada of wings that New York has assembled. The team may be incomplete; after losing Isaiah Hartenstein, they probably need another center to back up Mitchell Robinson, and they might also still look to move Julius Randle. But Brunson clearly feels that he’s in good hands, and that anything that needs to happen will happen. By taking less money than he’s worth, he’s helped to make sure of that.
Many players will not like Brunson’s choice, for the reasons already mentioned: their careers are short and they’re trying to build generational wealth. Financial concessions are not an option. So they don’t want teams using some shining franchise-friendly example against them at the bargaining table. Most will dismiss what Brunson’s done, and opt instead for the possibility of weird situations and lessened chances at winning, like LaVine has grown to know. Maybe they’ll point to the fact that Brunson belongs to a well-connected NBA family, and is probably going to be employable as a coach, front office guy, or broadcaster for decades to come—he’s not necessarily playing the same career-maximization game as them, anyway.
Either way, the road has forked. Until Brunson did what he did, it hadn't. Maybe his decision will be rare enough that traffic still only goes one way, really—his meandering from the take-the-most-no-matter-what trajectory could end up a thin, curious off-shoot from the broad and busy avenue, full of contract logjams and equally misfitting teammates. There are, and will be, more LaVines than Brunsons. I wouldn't bet on the ratio of the archetypes they represent to shift meaningfully around the league. But where there was no path for such a change, there now is one.
