Shortly before Memphis Grizzles star Ja Morant flashed a handgun inside a strip club on Instagram Live in early March, his team held a players-only meeting. Steven Adams, the 10-year NBA veteran who at 29 is by far the oldest member of the Grizzlies, urged his younger teammates to conduct themselves more professionally on the road after starting the season 12-20 away from home.
But the message did not resonate with Memphis’ franchise player. Morant went to the strip club, acted recklessly, and was given a suspension for his actions.
Other young teams like the Houston Rockets and Charlotte Hornets have also had problems in their locker rooms. The Rockets were described as a “mess” by members of the team, while the Hornets had to do without Miles Bridges after the forward was arrested for felony domestic violence in July (he pleaded no contest to a felony domestic charge in November and was given three years probation. He is currently under investigation by the NBA). And those are just the off-court issues.
It could be a coincidence that three of the five youngest teams in the league are experiencing these problems. But the NBA players and coaches the Guardian spoke with for this story don’t think there is anything coincidental about it – they believe that as the league has gotten younger, richer, and more influenced by social media, the absence of veterans in locker rooms is leading to problems that are otherwise preventable.
“I think there is a danger in not having that,” says retired 16-year NBA veteran CJ Miles. “Having the veteran guy who has been there and been around and dealt with those things, that pressure, might change the way [a guy like Morant] went to deal with those things.”
Miles adds that when he came into the league fresh out of high school: “There were not a lot of people in my family that I could take these other problems to. They just don’t have any knowledge of how we can talk this out or deal with it, and that’s no knock against them, it’s just the reality of where I am in life – I need people that have been there and walked [that walk] and did these things.”
Fortunately for players like Miles, there was no shortage of vets in the league at that time. In fact, Miles was drafted by the Utah Jazz in 2005, and he remained the youngest player on the team until 2008. In those days, players often played four years of college before joining the NBA. And when they got there, they sat on the bench and learned from older players about how to be a good pro, slowly earning their stripes before playing.
It was easy for young players to respect the vets because the vets essentially ran the league. But that is all changing.
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The NBA is getting younger. The average age of an NBA roster has decreased from 27.7 in 2000-01 to 26.1 this season despite the addition of two two-way developmental roster spots in 2017-18. There are just 64 players aged 32 and older in the NBA this season compared to a record-high 102 in 2000-01, despite advances in training and health science theoretically allowing players to play for longer. And the number of players aged 22 or younger broke the 100 mark in each of the past six seasons, something that had not happened previously.
Not only are there many more young players, but they are also earning more money than ever before. The average rookie deal of a top-five NBA draft pick more than doubled in the last decade, ballooning up to $42m over four years for the first overall selection. Players are also entering the league with shoe and endorsement deals stemming from social media fame before ever stepping foot on an NBA court.
Teams are feeding into this empowerment by giving their young players opportunities to start right away.
“And the way you do that is put as many of them as possible on a team and then just kind of just roll the ball out and just say: ‘Hey, go play!’” 16-year NBA veteran and current Toronto Raptor Thad Young explains. “And just letting them play through their mistakes as opposed to having somebody that is actually teaching them to show them how to do it.”
Damian Lillard, one of the most respected veterans in the NBA, believes this environment where young players are getting money, fame and playing time before proving themselves in the league has led to a sense of “entitlement.”
“When I came in the league [in 2012], you had to earn not just what you get from the team or the respect, you also had to earn your space on the team,” Lillard said on JJ Redick’s The Old Man and the Three podcast. “It was no: ‘Oh, you the sixth pick in the draft, it’s your team.’ Like what is this ‘your team’ stuff?”
Lillard believes this perceived entitlement also hurts the on-court product. “They come in and everything is just given to him from the beginning so that that affects how they are, the way they play. They play for themselves, they play for stats,” Lillard said. “The NBA I play in now is not the NBA that I came into. And I expect it to evolve. Everything is constantly changing. But I feel like I play for the love of the game. I want the competition.”
Udonis Haslem, who will retire at season’s end at age 42 with 20 years of NBA experience, says that as the league has gotten younger and more exciting, “the emphasis on winning is not as high as it used to be. Which I think for me [begs the question]: what are you playing for?”
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This is where a major philosophical divide begins. Many younger executives and fans coming from a more analytical background are in favour of tactics like “tanking,” which is another word for rolling the ball out and letting the young guys play with the added benefit of getting a high pick in the upcoming draft. They vehemently disagree with the idea of trading a first-round pick for Young, which the Raptors did at the 2022 trade deadline, or handing a roster spot to an ageing Haslem instead of taking a flyer on a young player.
Meanwhile, old-school executives and fans would argue that winning in the NBA requires a lot more than just skill; that while it’s true that young players are entering the league with more talent than ever, the habits they build on young teams that don’t prioritize winning can be difficult to break as they get older – especially if they don’t have a respected veteran to tell them bad habits to watch out for. Those veterans prioritize the intangibles it takes to build a healthy culture – attributes such as togetherness, toughness, resilience, and accountability, which can be learned through the experience of players who have been around the game.
Dwane Casey knows it. Despite leading a young, rebuilding Detroit Pistons team, the 14-year head coach has always made sure to have vets on his teams “Because they can pull guys aside and say: ‘Hey, this is how you do it,’” Casey says. “They’ve seen those situations so many times before and maybe they can’t do it physically any more, but they can still tell you about it and tell you what’s going on and what you should do.”
Sometimes their presence alone does the trick. Miles learned how to workout by watching older guys on his team: “I remember walking into the locker room and seeing Derek Fisher’s summertime workout and it changed the way I work completely from just seeing one of them because I’ve never seen anybody working like that before.”
Meanwhile, Miami head coach Erik Spoelstra recalls a moment in his second year coaching when he called a timeout to illustrate how the Heat should defend the opposition’s pick-and-roll.
“And before I could even put all the players on there, Haslem slammed my clipboard so frickin’ hard it ended up bouncing off the floor about 20 feet away. And I’m just standing there with my pen and he’s lecturing all of us: ‘It’s not about our schemes, it’s not about Xs and Os, it’s not about anything on this clipboard right here – it’s about competing and being a savage competitor and winning that next loose ball,’” Spoelstra says, adding there have been similar incidents around a dozen more times since.
“It’s monumentally important,” Spoelstra says about having veterans like Haslem on the roster. “He embodies everything that we believe in. And he has a way because of the respect level that he is able to influence and mentor literally every single player in the locker room … There is nobody else like him in the league. And the league needs a whole lot more guys like UD. It’s just hard to find that kind of guy that garners that kinda respect, that has the competitive character, that believes in all the things that we believe in, that’s able to communicate that in an effective way.”
Spoelstra continues: “I can’t say enough about that role … the league is getting younger and teams and young players need mentorship, they need guidance, they need leadership.”
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While it seems obvious that valuing veteran experience is wise, players like Miami’s Haslem and Toronto’s Young are rare. While vets such as Carmelo Anthony, DeMarcus Cousins, and Tristan Thompson have spoken about their desire to return to the NBA, it’s possible they haven’t stuck because of an unwillingness to accept a role in which they act as mentors while playing less – and making less money (Haslem’s salary has hovered around the veteran minimum since 2017).
“It’s not that easy. There isn’t a ton of ‘em in the pool, I don’t think, for whatever reason,” Raptors coach Nurse says about finding a veteran like Young. “I know that I’ve been here 10 years now and I know we’ve talked about needing that presence and trying to find who that is and there just doesn’t seem like there’s a whole long list of these guys.”
In regards to the mindset older players need, Miles says: “Nobody is saying you can’t play any more. It’s just a changing of the guard right now. The league is changing, and there’s nothing wrong with it. You still have value, but you gotta know that value might not be between the lines right now.”
Meanwhile, we have also seen situations where players have not listened to veterans, such as with Adams and Morant in Memphis. But it’s not surprising considering how these young players are empowered from the moment they enter the NBA, recognizing vets no longer run the league – they do.
“Young guys are making so much money that it’s like: ‘You can’t tell me nothing because look what I’m doing,’” Miles explains, arguing that young players need to take more accountability when it comes to listening to those with more experience. “The young guys gotta understand the only reason they are able to do what they are doing is because the veteran guys did what they did … They were able to get a $200m extension because of what the guys have done through all these years and raised awareness of the game.”
He adds: “They can’t be enemies. It can’t happen. They gotta both understand that they both are where they are because of each other. And when they can figure that out, then we can make this thing greater than it is right now.”
When they figure that out, then there should be fewer off-court issues to talk about and much more focus on the actual basketball being played.
