Why Is Dynasticism Growing in the NBA?

The number of NBA players who are the sons of NBA players has exploded from 10 in 2009 to 35 today.

Like sprinting, basketball was long one of the sports most driven by nature rather than nurture.

As data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz pointed out, identical twins are fairly common in the NBA (e.g., the Lopezes, the Collins, the Grants, the Van Arsdales, etc., including recently the Thompson Twins) If you’ve got the genes to make the NBA (such as for being really tall), your identical twin is likely to make it too.

In contrast, the Rogers appear to be the only known pair of identical twins to make it to the baseball major leagues in history.

And the Rogers twins still had to take different paths to the big leagues. Taylor Rogers is a conventional overhand power pitcher, while Tyler Rogers spent more years in the minors before perfecting his rare submarine pitching motion that can make hitters look really bad:

But sports are so competitive in the 21st Century that extreme nurture has infiltrated even basketball.

It used to be that little black kids from the projects would play pick-up basketball games all day long, and that was the best basketball nurture available: playing for hours against older, craftier guys from the ‘hood.

But now, NBA players like Steph Curry are increasingly coming from well to do families, often the sons of professional athletes. (Not all ex-pro athletes hang on to their money, but some do.)

From The New Yorker:

Heir Ball: How the Cost of Youth Sports Is Changing the N.B.A.

Pro sports have long seemed like the closest thing we have to a true meritocracy. But maybe not anymore.

By Jay Caspian Kang

June 23, 2025

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