Welcome to the N.B.A.’s other training camp
- Thread starter FelixMantilla
- Start date
This personal brand crap has gone too far. It's become a league of LOOK AT ME egos both on the court and off the court. Basketball is one of my favorite sports, but watching these guys constantly play hero ball and actually be encouraged to by the media just completely turns me off. Thank god the Spurs get a lot of national TV time or else I'd proably not watch at all given the current state of the Cs.
It's the AAU culture. I remember Harrison Barnes in an interview while a freshman at UNC talk about how his focus is in building his brand. I almsot puked.bellowthecat said:
bellowthecat said:
You mean it's gone too far when the "personal brand" is something you find distasteful. Tim Duncan's personal brand is fine; Steph Curry's is fine; Kevin Durant's is fine. But when you don't like it? GOD DAMN IT, players these days!
bellowthecat said:
Disagree. This might have been true of the previous generation, 97-03. But the new stars in the league play the game the right way* and most of them are pretty charismatic and likable off the court* (especially when compared to the meat heads of the NFL and dullards of baseball). I can't imagine not enjoying Westbrook on and off the court.
*harden and howard are the exceptions.
It sounds like a pretty good program. It's really difficult, I think, for the outside world to understand the jump that these kids take from being in college, a good portion of them poor, and then suddenly get tons of money. So many athletes go broke, that sometimes I am surprised to hear that an athlete DIDN'T end up going broke. Some of the advice seems like common sense, but these kids are in such uncommon situations, that it is difficult to apply basic principals that you would think most people would have.
I personally couldn't care less about a player's brand, but I also know just how huge the market is for basketball sneakers alone, not to mention various other apparel items like hats, t-shirts, keychains, whatever. To me it seems like NBA fashion for some players is just trying to show up in the most ridiuclos outfit possible, but people much more in the know about fashion than I might have a perfectly logical explanation for all of that. All I know is that if what Andrew Wiggins wore during the draft counts as fashion, than I'm perfectly fine being unfashionable.
I personally couldn't care less about a player's brand, but I also know just how huge the market is for basketball sneakers alone, not to mention various other apparel items like hats, t-shirts, keychains, whatever. To me it seems like NBA fashion for some players is just trying to show up in the most ridiuclos outfit possible, but people much more in the know about fashion than I might have a perfectly logical explanation for all of that. All I know is that if what Andrew Wiggins wore during the draft counts as fashion, than I'm perfectly fine being unfashionable.
It's good that the league is trying to help these kids hang on to their money. It won't succeed in every case.
I'm a little surprised that agents don't do more in loco parentis. I doubt if Antoine Walker's agent collected any fees after Twoine declared bankruptcy.
I'm a little surprised that agents don't do more in loco parentis. I doubt if Antoine Walker's agent collected any fees after Twoine declared bankruptcy.
Grin&MartyBarret said:
The Social Chair said:
Consider: This program may have bent the curve of opinion by helping these kids understand how to manage not only personal brand, but also legal concerns and safely managing their windfalls. Surely prior-generation players like Ron Artest and Antoine Walker could have benefited from many aspects of, at the very least, being pointed in the right direction.
I'm not at all opposed to this program. I was responding to the idea that players today care too much about their brand to play team basketball, or whatever it was that post was arguing.zenter said:
Grin&MartyBarret said:
Duncan doesn't even do interviews, man, much less have a fragrance or menswear line.
For anyone who has been a friend to a pro athlete these programs can only be good news. I went to high school with a guy who played in the NBA and MLB and went through two fortunes in about six years each.
moly99 said:
You're reinforcing my point. Player brands are annoying and get in the way when they involve a menswear line like Russell Westbrook's, or a fragrance line like (I dunno who has a fragrance line), but when a player works to cultivate his image as that of a hardworking, no-nonsense, consummate teammate the way that Duncan and Durant do, we don't mind them at all. Durant's got an entire agency worth of people working for him to carefully control how he's branded and perceived. Yet, nobody would ever complain about his personal brand, despite the fact that it's been cultivated as meticulously as any player in the league. Too many people consider the focus on personal branding as a bad thing in and of itself, but that's a really naive way of looking at it.
HB40? The Black Falcon? Why worry about college or the experience man? He's got 2 nicknames and brands to build up!!HomeRunBaker said:
(In all seriousness I liked it since it brought about one of my favorite nicknames. "White Raven" for Ryan Kelly, since he was pretty much the opposite of Barnes)