It started with a punch. When Draymond Green laid his hands on former teammate Jordan Poole during a Golden State Warriors practice ahead of the 2022-23 season, it didn’t just lead to the downfall of the Warriors dynasty. The notorious also event kicked off an era of unprecedented publicity in the NBA.
After all, TMZ took advantage of the social media frenzy that followed reports of the punch by obtaining and leaking the video. Later, rapper Cam’ron and journalist Pablo Torre took turns reporting what Poole said to inspire the punch. It all served to satisfy a rabid, increasingly online fanbase hungry for ever more information.
It didn’t even matter if any of it was true (though the video indeed was). What mattered is what it all said about our society and the role NBA players play in it, which was that a line had been crossed and whatever ounce of privacy NBA players used to have was gone; That the one-time sanctity of the NBA locker room, practice court and private lives was no more; That everything now had the potential to become public, and players better get used to it before it’s too late.
“You think about big situations – the Poole video was something that just should not get out because it was so disturbing,” 14-year NBA veteran and vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, Garrett Temple, tells the Guardian. “So, that’s just the league we live in now. And you have to be very cognizant of [it].”
Following the punch, a flurry of other off-court incidents that in the past would have likely stayed in-house found their way into the public sphere: The audio of Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kyle Anderson’s locker room tirade about teammate Rudy Golbert was leaked, as were the details of a heated locker room discussion between Milwaukee Bucks forward Bobby Portis and head coach Adrian Griffin.
Simultaneously, stuff that was happening on the court that in the past only courtside fans would have been privy to made its way onto social media with increasing frequency, including a fan video of Poole failing to pay attention during a timeout and lip-readers highlighting Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Dončić being upset with a teammate and Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James getting upset with an opposing coach. In fact, there is even a popular Twitter account dedicated exclusively to reading lips and leaking the audio from on-court interactions.
But it all reached a boiling point during an off-court incident that occurred in Philadelphia last month, when 76ers wing Kelly Oubre Jr was involved in a hit-and-run when a vehicle struck him while biking home. The event was traumatic for Oubre, leading to a broken rib that would keep him out of 11 games, but it was the reaction that followed that was even scarier, when Oubre’s account of the event was put into question after police failed to find footage of the incident at the intersection that he said it occurred.
Eventually, TMZ leaked the video and audio from Oubre’s home Ring Camera – a notoriously insecure device with subpar privacy standards and a long history of being hacked into – showing that he had, in fact, come home wincing in pain with a bicycle in hand. Nevertheless, Oubre was the subject of online “conspiracy theorists”, as he called them, coming up with wild ideas about himself and the incident.
“This was and is a very traumatic situation for me and my family,” Oubre told reporters upon returning to the 76ers in early December. “So, I just wish that my life wasn’t like The Truman Show where everybody kind of watched it and have their own opinion.”
There is a belief inside and outside of the league that this is what the players signed up for. After all, these are famous athletes being paid millions of dollars to play basketball, and if the fans want to know more about them and their private lives, so be it. “I think it’s the same as it’s always been,” 16-year veteran and current Phoenix Suns guard Eric Gordon says. “Things are always gonna happen. It seems like, yeah, people are knowing what’s going on a little bit more. But everybody’s been kind of knowing what’s been going on.”
That includes rookies like 20-year-old Toronto Raptors wing Gradey Dick, who only entered the NBA this season but says: “I think it comes with [the territory].”
“You’re, in all humbleness, a big-time athlete, and I mean, in our case, we’re in the NBA, and it’s a dream for a lot of people. And so that means a lot of people are watching,” Dick adds. “So, people are gonna try everything they can to just find different things out about you.”
Of course, the lives of professional athletes have always been the subject of public scrutiny, as the new Netflix documentary, Beckham, about David Beckham’s career as a professional footballer goes to show. But it has never been this public, at least not for North American athletes, and certainly not for NBA players.
Think about it: Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan, the most famous basketball player of his generation, used to go play golf and gamble between playoff games in the 1990s and nobody knew the better of it; Charles Barkley, the leading scorer of the 1992 Dream Team, used to walk down the streets of Barcelona during the Olympic Games without security. That’s simply not possible anymore.
![‘We give our lives to the fans all year, you know, every game, [and] through our platforms as well.’ Kevin Durant says. ‘So, sometimes we want some stuff to be sacred, but there’s nothing sacred nowadays.’](https://media.guim.co.uk/3d0ea2b06962ee0f21466c3ae933609725a87674/0_0_4920_3280/1000.jpg)
Nowadays, LeBron James is under such a big microscope that if he so much as sits for a few seconds of the national anthem at his son’s basketball game, he gets ridiculed for it. In the decreasingly regulated state of X and other social media platforms following in Elon Musk’s lead — where it is becoming difficult to confirm what’s real and what’s fake — the authenticity of content no longer even matters, nor do the full context and facts, so it didn’t matter that James was only sitting because that’s when he has always entered games in order to avoid being swarmed by fans. What matters is that people believe this content to be true and feed off of it.
“I believe it’s a problem,” Phoenix Suns forward Kevin Durant says. “There’s so many people who want to cover the sport who need that type of stuff to I guess catapult them in that side of the business. I mean, a lot of this stuff is about gossip. And letting it get more and more about gossiping and the dynamics and personalities that are these players more so than just the game, you know? The game is not enough nowadays.”
“So, you got a lot of casual fans that come into the game and want to know more about these players outside of basketball and sometimes that stuff’s interesting. So, that’s just part of what we do now.”
The reason things have changed so dramatically can be boiled down to the fact that social media runs the world, celebrity culture runs social media, and NBA players are more famous than ever. In some ways, NBA players are getting a taste of what European soccer players have faced in the tabloids since the days of Beckham, albeit on steroids as those habits have been compounded with the 24/7 social media news cycle, cameras and audio recorders set up in every nook and cranny of the country, and content creators with the ability to make good money by having their videos go viral.
“In terms of stuff getting out with teams, it’s definitely a lot more than it used to be. Or at least it gets reported [more],” Temple says. “The reporting is different now as well. We’re hearing things that GMs are saying where [in the past] those things might have been out into the media but the media wasn’t really reporting it.”
“I think media is different now. Like, they’re always looking for something now I think. They like drama,” Knicks forward OG Anunoby adds.
“I guess it sucks [as an athlete]... you can’t control nothing so it just depends. I guess no player would like that. It’s kind of weird.”
In the past few years, we have seen several young players struggle to adapt to the newfound money and fame that comes with the modern NBA, as well as various forms of media that are there to document their every move. Anthony Edwards recently joined a long list of young players that include Zion Williamson and Ja Morant – who was suspended 25 games this season for wielding a gun on social media – whose private lives have bled into the public sphere and caused controversies for themselves and their organizations.
When Durant is asked if this increased publicity is a blessing and a curse, since turning the NBA into a soap opera at least brings new fans to the league, he says: “It’s just a curse, I think. In my opinion, it’s always good to stay private. We give our lives to the fans all year, you know, every game, [and] through our platforms as well.”
“So, sometimes we want some stuff to be sacred, but there’s nothing sacred nowadays.”
Nikola Jokić, the Denver Nuggers star and 2022 NBA MVP, didn’t mince words on the subject during an appearance last week on teammate Michael Porter Jr.’s podcast.
“Being famous, some people like it, some people don’t. When I finish my career, I really wish nobody knows me,” Jokić said. “I really don’t like this life because, at the end of the day, we are just basketball players. We are just good at what we are doing. But the media is something that is around us, and, of course, we are getting paid because of the media, because of our popularity.”
He added: “It just feels sad, whenever you go to the bar, restaurant, some game, people are just taking their phones out and trying to record you. I think that’s really, I’m going to say, rude. It’s not that I’m out showing myself; I’m just who I am.”
The league and its organizations are actively working against this rising tide, trying to figure out how to keep information in-house before it gets leaked to the public and spirals into something much bigger – something that could have a significant impact on how the organization is viewed or even how the players perform on the basketball court.
Some organizations are better at it than others. The Toronto Raptors, for example, have remained a relatively quiet organization by bringing in high-character individuals who are more likely to stay out of trouble and by fostering a familial atmosphere where everybody respects each other enough to address issues in-house.
But still, they are fighting against what Charlotte Hornets head coach Steve Clifford calls “a basic tenet of leadership”, which he explains by saying: “The more people you have around, the bigger chance you have of more stuff like that [getting out].” And with the increasing size of team staffs, friends, families, and agents surrounding the league, there are more and more people with access to information and personal agendas to fulfill.
The repercussions of these leaks can be significant. The punch, for example, occurred over a year ago and the Warriors are yet to find their footing. “Even when you bring it up now, people are really angry about that,” ESPN Reporter Ramona Shelburne said on a recent Lowe Post Podcast. “That shattered the mystique of trust that had always been there with the Warriors.”
“I don’t think anything is ever the same since that leak.”
At the end of the day, as the Warriors learned, players and teams only have so much control. In a world where anything that happens in previously private spaces can become public information, where any piece of information can become “content,” and where any piece of content can become monetizable on social media platforms driven by information-obsessed fans, celebrities including NBA players are only going to have a more difficult time staying out of the limelight going forward. It probably isn’t fair, but it’s the reality. And the sooner they get used to it, the better.
“It’s a strange world that we live in,” Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker says. “Especially with social media, you know, it’s changed right in front of our eyes.”
“And I think none of us really know how to control it.”
• This article was amended on 5 January 2024. An error introduced during editing led an earlier version to mistakenly refer to Nikola Jokić as the reigning NBA MVP. Jokić won the award in 2021 and 2022.
