The NBA has a star problem

In a playoff game against the New York Knicks last month, the Indiana Pacers’ Tyrese Haliburton made an improbable shot at the buzzer at Madison Square Garden in New York to send the game to overtime. Then he made a choking symbol with his hands, an homage to former Pacer Reggie Miller, who directed a similar gesture toward Spike Lee, a Knicks superfan, 31 years ago. (Reddit via r/NBATalk)

By Tania Ganguli

If you tuned into the thrilling Game 1 of the NBA Finals last Thursday night, you may have found yourself wondering:

Who are these guys?

There’s no LeBron James, no Stephen Curry. No Los Angeles Lakers, no New York Knicks, nor even any Boston Celtics. Neither of the teams — the Indiana Pacers or the Oklahoma City Thunder — had been in the NBA Finals for more than a decade. To the average sports fan, their rosters are largely unknown.

“I’m not sure I completely buy into the premise of your question,” Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, said when asked about a finals with limited star power. “I think Shai is an enormous star.”

He was referring to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who won the NBA’s MVP this year after leading the league in scoring and helping drive the Thunder to 68 wins, the most in franchise history. Silver also mentioned Tyrese Haliburton, the Pacers guard with a penchant for late-game heroics.

But even Silver acknowledged those players are lesser known outside basketball fandom than the league’s biggest stars. In some ways, that’s a product of what the league wants — for all of its teams, no matter how small the market, to have a chance at making the finals. But that change also conflicts with one of its major tenets — that star power sells.

Stars have fueled the NBA since the 1980s. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson drove its stampede into the popular consciousness, and then Michael Jordan globalized the game. Stars drive viewership and interest, which in turn drive up the price of media rights deals, cash from sponsors, ticket sales and team valuations.

For the past decade, the league’s ecosystem has revolved around James and Curry. James is now 40 years old, and Curry is 37. The question of who will be the next face of the league, once those two have retired, has hung over the sport for years.

The league’s new push for parity could hurt its search for stars. Silver noted that part of what made Curry, James and all the superstars who came before them so popular was that they regularly played for championships. But the NBA has deliberately made it harder to build a dominating superteam, and long strings of finals appearances are no longer the norm.

At the same time, audiences are shrinking. More than 35 million people watched Game 6 of the 1998 finals, in which Jordan won his sixth (and final) NBA championship. In 2023, when the Denver Nuggets won their first championship, the series averaged 11.6 million viewers per game.

Winning alone does not guarantee the same amount of exposure as it once did.

To some extent, stars are made. When Victor Wembanyama, the Frenchman who is nearly 7 1/2 feet tall, was set to enter the NBA, the league promoted his games while he was playing in France.

But talent and exposure can take a star only so far. The best player on the 2023 championship Denver Nuggets team, for example, was Nikola Jokic, a Serbian center who has won the league’s MVP award three times and is one of the best to have ever played the game. But he had no interest in promoting himself and didn’t capitalize on the moment to build his brand.

Jaclyn Reilly, co-founder of Ethos Group, a brand strategy firm that works with WNBA star Angel Reese, said the fracturing media landscape, with its ever increasing choices of content, made it more difficult for an athlete to stand out. “That’s why it’s even more important for the athlete to be strategic,” she said.

All eyes are on Haliburton and Gilgeous-Alexander. The Thunder have built a sustainable team that some expect to be championship contenders for years. That would give more exposure to Gilgeous-Alexander’s game play, his fun sense of fashion and his signature shoe with Converse. His profile has already risen this season.

For the Pacers, Haliburton has created several viral moments this season. In a playoff game against the Knicks last month, he made an improbable shot at the buzzer at Madison Square Garden in New York to send the game to overtime. Then he made a choking symbol with his hands, an homage to former Pacer Reggie Miller, who directed a similar gesture toward Spike Lee, a Knicks superfan, 31 years ago.

Knicks fans hated that Haliburton did that — but they won’t forget it either.

Last week, in Game 1 of the finals, Haliburton hit a jumper in the game’s final second that won the game for the Pacers, who had trailed by 15 points in the fourth quarter.

A performance like that, especially if it leads to a championship, just might be the kind that makes a superstar.

Haliburton walked into his postgame interview carrying a pair of his signature shoes from Puma, which he had worn during the game. Some reporters chuckled as he thumped the shoes down on the table, and Haliburton smiled sheepishly. But he wasn’t going to let a chance for that much exposure slip by.

NBA Finals

(Best of 7)

Game 1

Thursday

Indiana Pacers 111, Oklahoma City

Thunder 110

Game 2 (IND leads 1-0)

Sunday

Pacers at Thunder, 8 p.m. ET

Game 3

Wednesday

Thunder at Pacers, 8:30 p.m. ET (ABC)

Game 4

Friday

Thunder at Pacers, 8:30 p.m. ET (ABC)