They sit in a Harlem church basement or a south Brooklyn deli, at an elite high school in Queens or a failing middle school on the Lower East Side, near Madison Square Garden or the Cage or the Rucker or some other calcified shrine, and they explain what their city has lost.
Once, New York was home to more basketball talent than any other city on the planet. No more. As for what changed, theories vary. An older scout says it’s all about attitude. A younger coach says they only lack muscle. Some of the NBA’s remaining New Yorkers blame the city’s emphasis on skills of dwindling value to today’s teams. Others cite greed, poverty, overcrowding, or — why not? — video games, social media, and YouTube. It’s all flailing guesswork aimed at making sense of a decline no one saw coming but everyone watched happen. And though the explanations differ, on the central point, they all agree.
New York is no longer the greatest basketball city on earth. Right now, it’s not even close.
When we talk about the decline of New York City basketball, we’re not talking about the Knicks’ interminable incompetence or the Nets’ lavish and misguided efforts to build a contender. We’re talking about the city’s footprint in the NBA: Years ago, New York’s playgrounds and high schools served as the most fertile breeding ground for the game’s elite. Today, you’re just as likely to become a star if you’re born in Los Angeles, Toronto, or Raleigh.
In the 1970s, eight different New Yorkers made All-Star teams. That was more than the states of Texas, New Jersey, Florida, and Georgia combined.1 When Julius Erving wanted to test himself, he rode the train into Manhattan from Long Island. When Wilt Chamberlain wanted to prove he stood above the best in the world, he made his way north from Philly.
Football has always belonged to the Midwest and the South, baseball to America’s suburbs. Those sports were for places with manicured lawns and summers that stretched until Halloween. “Basketball belongs to the cities,” Pete Axthelm wrote in his 1970 classic The City Game. And for decades, no city played it better than New York.
New York’s personalities have long been legion; it’s a magnet for artists and bankers, immigrants and tourists; it’s home to Donald Trump and Louis Farrakhan and all permutations in between. New York has never been inextricably associated with basketball, the way Indiana or Kentucky are. Yet that’s part of what made New York hoops so great. The city was the best at basketball simply because it was the best at everything. To be great at something, the flyover states had to give a damn. New York just had to exist.
The notion that New York produced the best basketball talent was so indisputable, so self-perpetuating, that it became one of those opinions that hardened into fact. From 1971 to 1978, a New Yorker was inducted into the Hall of Fame every year but one. They called the city the Mecca because, over the years, pilgrims arrived by the thousands. Guards from across the country trekked to New York playgrounds to study moves from the world’s best ball handlers. Basketball-loving creatives flocked to the city, making films and writing books that aimed to capture the soul of the game.
Yet by the ’80s, the city’s dominance had already begun to fade. New York produced six All-Stars in that decade,2 no more than Chicago. In the ’90s and 2000s, Bernard King and Chris Mullin retired, leaving no New York–bred Hall of Famers to replace them. It’s tricky to determine precisely who counts as a New Yorker, but for the purposes of this story, here are some rules: Long Island doesn’t count. Neither does Westchester, and definitely not Newark or any other part of New Jersey. New Yorkers come from the five boroughs — nowhere else. But beyond that, it gets complicated. Michael Jordan was born in Brooklyn but raised in North Carolina. Same goes for Carmelo Anthony and Baltimore. Despite the homecoming narrative that surrounded Melo’s signing with the Knicks, no one in the city feels much hometown pride over his career. But what about players who grow up in New York and then leave to play high school in another state? What about those who go to a prep school for their senior year? It’s tough to decide who spent enough time in the city to be considered a true New York product. For our purposes, we’ll label as a New Yorker any player who spent at least one year at a New York City high school. By that definition, there are 12 New Yorkers who played at least one NBA game this season.3 Forty years ago, there were 16. And back then, the NBA had only 17 teams.
Regardless of whom you consider a true New York product, you won’t have a hard time finding evidence to show the five boroughs’ decline. How about this: North Carolina’s Research Triangle region has produced the same number of McDonald’s All Americans in the last six years as New York. Not to mention that in the last decade, the Toronto suburb of Brampton has yielded more top-five NBA draft picks. It’s not only an issue of elite talent. According to Mode Analytics, New York state ranked 27th per capita this past season in supplying players for Division I men’s college basketball programs. If you want to play D-I ball, the raw chances of making it are better if you’re raised in Delaware or Wyoming than in New York. There are more Californians than New Yorkers in the ACC right now, and more Indianans in the Big East.
We can keep going. Not a single New Yorker was taken in the first round of June’s NBA draft. And before last season, the Student Sports high school basketball poll had only one New York team (Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln) in its top 25. The same poll had two top-25 teams from Jacksonville.
But cities are judged by their stars. Los Angeles has Russell Westbrook and Paul Pierce; Chicago has Derrick Rose and Dwyane Wade. “Let’s think about this for a minute,” says Macky Bergman, a New York native who runs a youth basketball program in lower Manhattan. “Who’s the best player to come out of New York in the last 25 years? I mean, you’ve got Lamar Odom, Ron Artest, Joakim Noah. The fact that we’re even talking about those guys lets you know it’s a problem.”
If there’s any type of player the city has been known for producing over the last 25 years, it would probably be the overhyped, catastrophic bust. Lloyd Daniels went from being compared to Magic Johnson to being caught in a Las Vegas crack house to being shot and nearly killed back home in Queens in 1989 — and he still had enough talent to somehow scrap his way into the NBA. In 1993, Felipe Lopez wasn’t just an All-American — he was the subject of a 10,000-word profile in The New Yorker. A decade later, his career ended when Lopez couldn’t find a spot at the end of an NBA bench. In 2000, Andre Barrett, Taliek Brown, and Omar Cook were all McDonald’s All Americans, representing the supposed renaissance of the New York City point guard. Altogether, the “Holy Trinity,” as they were known in high school, went on to score 256 total points in the NBA.
A couple years later, Lenny Cooke tumbled from his perch as the top-ranked high school player in the nation all the way out of the NBA draft; he’s now one of the great cautionary tales of the NBA’s prep-to-pro era. Next came Sebastian Telfair, who shared the cover of Slam with LeBron James in 2002, when both were still in high school; as a senior, Telfair landed solo on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Now 29, he spent last season playing in China and recently signed a deal to be a backup point guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder. And if it weren’t for Lance Stephenson’s recent emergence as a nearly All-Star-caliber player on the Indiana Pacers over the past two seasons, the Coney Island native would likely occupy a spot on his city’s roster of underachievers who never quite made it.
Which brings us back to Bergman’s question. Who’s the best New York product of the last 25 years? “If you really think about [it],” he says, “the best one is probably Stephon Marbury. Stephon Marbury! I mean, good player and everything — even better than people give him credit for — but really? That’s the best we can do? And we’re supposed to be OK with that?”
So this is what we’re left with. The home to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bob Cousy, the largest city in the most talent-rich country in the world, is now hanging its hat on the second-leading scorer for the Beijing Ducks.4
How did this happen? The answer depends on whom you ask.
