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

Paywall here.

… In 2009, ten players in the league had fathers who’d played for N.B.A. teams; this past season, there were thirty-five. The future promises even more hoop legacies. The likely No. 2 pick in the upcoming draft is Dylan Harper, whose father, Ron, played with Michael Jordan on the Chicago Bulls. Lists of top high-school recruits include the names Anthony, as in Carmelo, and Arenas, as in Gilbert. …

Genetics is the most obvious explanation: if your dad is six feet eight and your mom is six feet two, you stand a better chance of guarding Kevin Durant—or Durant’s kids—than my children will ever have.

One thing that is going on on the nature side is that I suspect the rise of college athletics for women has led to more male jocks marrying female jocks. I can recall reading about an early jock-jockette marriage (shortstop Nomar Garciaparra and soccer player Mia Hamm) about 20 years ago and thinking that they seem well-suited for each other since they are both enormously interested in sports, so they always had plenty to talk about.

So there now seems to be more assortative mating for athleticism and height than before when fewer women knew that much about sports, so jocks were less likely to marry jockettes in the old days:

Marilyn Monroe [just back from a USO tour of Korea]: “Oh, Joe, it was wonderful. You can’t imagine what it’s like having 10,000 people cheering for you!”

Joe DiMaggio: “Yes, I can.”

Probably didn’t have that many satisfying conversations about when to anticipate a breaking pitch

Back to The New Yorker:

But the N.B.A. has been around for almost eighty years, and the number of roster spots in the league has barely changed since the mid-nineties. If all that mattered were good genes, the influx of second-generation players would have shown up thirty years ago. Why the spike now?

To answer that question, one N.B.A. executive told me, you probably have to look at the economy of basketball development. The children of pros are generally wealthy and well connected; they have access to “better training, coaching, and the right people who can put them on the right lists,” the executive said.

A ex-pro dad would be a lot better than a welfare mom at picking out an AAU team that isn’t just a hustle but is legitimately good at developing a boy’s talent.

“Those early edges accumulate.” Increasingly, players are made as much as they are born, and making those players costs money. A star prospect requires a set of physical gifts that might as well be divine in origin. But, to compete now, he will also likely need the kinds of resources that you have to buy, and a small industry has arisen to sell them.

“It’s getting too expensive for some kids to even play, and the pressure to be perfect takes away the love for the game,” Dončić told me. “I think about my daughter and wonder what sports will feel like for her one day.” Jay Williams, a basketball analyst at ESPN who was the second pick in the 2002 N.B.A. draft, said to me, “When I came into the league in the early two-thousands, player development was mostly raw talent, repetition, and survival.” Now, he said, “development starts younger, it’s more specialized, and it’s driven by business.” Jermaine O’Neal, a six-time N.B.A. All-Star who recently founded a basketball-centered prep school, told me, “The cost of everything has changed.” O’Neal, like James, grew up with a single mother in a working-class area of a small city. Sports in general, O’Neal said, are “pricing out a percentage of athletes raised in communities like mine.”

The professionalization of youth sports has changed not only who reaches the N.B.A. but how the game is played when they get there. Watching the post-season this year, I found the level of play to be possibly higher than ever. But I felt little emotional connection to the game. Like many fans, I complain about the number of three-point shots that teams are taking, which turns so many games into an almost cynical exercise in playing the odds.

Today’s style is also more rehearsed, more optimized. This, I believe, can be traced to the way that the players are learning the game from an early age—to the difference between a childhood spent outdoors with your friends, competing against grown men, and one spent as a customer, with a cadre of coaches who push you only in the ways that you or, in most cases, your parents approve of.

“What used to be driven by someone’s hunger to improve, to figure it out and work to get better, becomes a job for a lot of these kids so early,” Steve Nash told me. This, he added, meant “essentially trading their enjoyment and motivation for a calculated approach that may be more suitable to young adults than young kids.”

America has a huge number of kids who play soccer, but we haven’t been terribly successful in the World Cup because we mostly don’t subject our young kids to the kind of repetitious drilling in soccer academies that the Dutch perfected for creating professional players out of eight year olds. The American soccer tradition, in contrast, was to roll out the ball and have 22 kids run up and down and see which team wins, which sounds like more fun for the 99% of kids who aren’t going to become pros.

But now the academy approach is spreading to American youth soccer and even to basketball as Europeans seem to be arriving in the NBA with better basketball nurture.

The NBA added the three point shot in 1979, but didn’t do much with it for the next generation. One reason was that projects playground nurture wasn’t conducive to long sessions by yourself perfecting your outside shot. There was always somebody else around who wanted to use the court too, so you played games rather than drill yourself.

But with all the emphasis on the three point shot over the last 15 years or so, today’s players are somewhat more likely to grow up in the suburbs shooting for hours on their driveway.

And, for the elites, they now spend hours shooting on indoor courts with their trainer fetching the ball for them.

… One coach told the authors of the report [on youth basketball] published by [Laker] Luka Dončić’s foundation, “Players don’t know how to anticipate where the ball will fall because they’re so used to their trainers getting their rebounds.”