Each week during the 2024-25 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.
[Last time: Is Nikola Jokić enjoying the greatest statistical season ever?]
Fact or Fiction: The NBA is without a future face
Friday’s matchup between the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers will not only feature the Eastern Conference’s two best teams but also Jayson Tatum and Donovan Mitchell, the most recent members of a club that includes only 55 players in the NBA’s history — six-time All-Star selections by the age of 28.
This comes at the same time as another, broader conversation in the weeks following the All-Star break, when each of the league’s best players was asked: Who will become the next face of the NBA?
“It’s something that we as players normally kind of don’t really have full control over,” said Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, as if anyone is supposed to answer that question better. “That’s literally for the world to decide, and whoever the world gravitates to is going to become it naturally.”
Asked a similar question, if he considers himself a top candidate to become the NBA’s face, Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards said, “No, not really,” joking, “That’s what they got Wemby for.”
That conversation, the one being had most prominently on ESPN and TNT and FS1 and former players’ podcasts and the media ecosystem that feeds off of them, distracts us from what is happening before our eyes: Tatum and Mitchell are all-time greats in their primes, and, as contributors to the most talent-rich collection of superstars in the game’s history, they are carrying the mantle for the league right now.
Tatum and Mitchell are not accepted as serious MVP candidates, even as one captains a title defense and the other steers his team on a 68-win pace. Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Dončić are more commonly considered in conversations about the game’s best active player, though Tatum has an argument to be included among them. But there we go falling into the same trap.
For if all we ever discuss is, “Who will be the next LeBron James?” or, “Can Victor Wembanyama become the face of the NBA?” careers of players like Tatum and Mitchell are the forest we will miss for the trees.
Perhaps it is because James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant have hung on for so long. Whether it is a conscious decision or not, we are unwilling to cede “the face” of the NBA to anyone until they are gone, so we are underappreciating the game’s other greats — the generation between them and who is next.
Mitchell is on pace to join Curry, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain and John Havlicek as the only players to lead a team to 68 wins in a regular season. We can respond to this in one of two ways: 1) Holy s***, Mitchell and his Cavaliers could join that list! or 2) Mitchell and his Cavs are an anomaly. I will let you decide which one the broader NBA intelligentsia has chosen. (Hint: It is the way that diminishes the product.)
Mitchell is one of 10 guards ever to log his statistical résumé (12,000 points, 2,000 rebounds and 2,000 assists) as a 28-year-old, six-time All-Star. The others: Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Kyrie Irving. However you want to measure the accomplishments of the game’s greatest players, Mitchell finds a way among them.
Because he belongs.
But he does not quite feel like one of those all-time greats, so he cannot possibly lead Cleveland to a championship, or so the narrative goes. But what if he did? Would you accept him among them? Tatum did, and the perception of him has barely budged. While folks were debating whether Jaylen Brown, the Finals MVP, was Boston’s best player, they missed most of the fun of experiencing a legend in real time.
Make no mistake: Tatum is a legend. The list of players to log 13,000 points, 4,000 rebounds and 2,000 assists at age 26 includes only him and LeBron. Tatum has the most playoff points ever at his age (2,711).
The Celtics superstar is finding his way to even shorter lists than his Cavaliers counterpart. Consider this: From 2006-10, arguably the best four-year stretch of Kobe Bryant’s career, when he was a top-three MVP candidate each year, won two titles and reached a third NBA Finals, he averaged 28.4 points (on 46/35/85 shooting splits), 5.7 rebounds, 5.2 assists and two combined blocks and steals in 38.6 minutes per game.
Similarly, over the past four seasons, including this one, when Tatum has made the All-NBA first team each season (and, yes, he will make it for a fourth consecutive time in the spring), he has averaged 27.7 points (on 46/36/84 shooting splits), 8.4 rebounds, 4.9 assists and 1.6 combined blocks and steals in 36.2 minutes a game. He has made two NBA Finals, won one and still has a championship to defend this year.
That is right: Tatum’s last four seasons compare favorably to Bryant’s best four seasons, and he turns 27 years old — the age when legends really begin to flourish, before Bryant won his only MVP — on Monday.
When Tatum tells reporters, “I’m very accomplished at a young age, but the truth is, I envision myself as one of those guys — LeBron, Steph, KD. I want the next generation to view me as that,” listen to the man.
If not, listen to what James and Durant and Curry, those all-time greats, had said about Tatum at ages 23, 24 and 25 — before he won his first championship, calling him “elite,” “ridiculous” and “a supreme talent.”
But does Tatum feel like his career is appreciated? “Honestly, no,” he said when posed that question by The Washington Post. “If you took the name and the face away from all my accomplishments and you’re just like, ‘This is what this Player A accomplished at 26,’ people would talk about [me] a lot differently.”
It is probably not because of fans, since Tatum’s jersey No. 0 ranked third behind James and Curry on the NBA’s recent list of top sellers. It is because of the voices around the game.
When asked about the responsibility that comes with being the face of the league, James said on Thursday, “Why do you wanna be the face of a league when all the people that cover and talk about our game on a day-to-day basis s*** on everybody? To have that responsibility is just weird. It’s weird energy.”
We spend all this time wondering who will be the next face of the NBA when we have Tatum and arguably four players better than him. So instead we debate why it cannot be the international face of Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokić, Antetokounmpo or Dončić. Or even Wembanyama before he had the chance to turn 21.
We have some damn good American-born players, too. We have barely even mentioned Edwards. Two more, Tatum and Mitchell, face each other on Friday, and if you are not watching — if instead you are wondering who is next — you will be missing out on a pair of legends, among the faces of today’s NBA.
Determination: Fiction. The NBA has many faces of the future.
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