After the Boston Celtics thumped the Golden State Warriors, 128–95, on Tuesday night, the Warriors’ coach, Steve Kerr, faced the press and tried to explain how the prohibitive favorites—the unquestioned best team in the N.B.A.—had been so thoroughly embarrassed by a team that had lost five of six games since the All-Star break, a team that seemed so dysfunctional that its locker room had been described as a morgue. The Warriors’ game plan had strategic problems, Kerr acknowledged, and some blame fell on him as coach. But that couldn’t totally account for why the team seemed, from the opening minutes, as if it had been sucker-punched. “It starts with a passion, and an anger, and intensity,” Kerr said. The team had lacked the fire that night.
Shortly after, Kevin Durant, one of the top two or three basketball players on the planet, sat in front of the media, a White Sox cap pulled low, his eyes cast down and to the side. He was asked about Kerr’s comments. Did the team need to play with a little more anger? “I thought we move off of joy,” Durant said, referring to what has openly been one of the Warriors’ core values. “Now anger?” He quickly shook his head, seemingly a gesture of irritation. Of course, Durant might be unhappy to see it described that way—he has repeatedly made clear how frustrated he is by the tendency of journalists to analyze his every word and glance.
Whatever the Warriors’ true state of mind—not to mention that of the Celtics, who credited a “long plane ride” to California with transforming them from a collection of dissatisfied individuals into a tightly bonded team—the general mood of the N.B.A. lately has been, well, moody. “When I meet with them, what surprises me is that they’re truly unhappy,” the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, said of the league’s players, in a conversation with the Ringer’s Bill Simmons at the M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, last Friday. “A lot of these young men are generally unhappy.’’
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard any commissioner say,” Charles Barkley said on the ESPN morning show “Get Up,” a few days later. “These guys are making twenty, thirty, forty million dollars a year. They work six, seven months a year. They stay in the best hotels in the world—they ain’t got no problems.” Countless shouty sports-radio hosts surely agree. And, certainly, there are many N.B.A. players who are happy. But it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to realize that money and fame do not protect a person against loneliness or even depression—and, in fact, can serve as accelerators. Silver’s diagnosis—perhaps correctly, perhaps conveniently—was that the isolation and anxiety he saw among N.B.A. players was not a basketball problem but a societal problem. We live, he said, in an “age of anxiety.” He alluded to the well-documented effects of social media—how it can increase jealousy and image-consciousness; how its promise of human connection can be shallow; how it serves as a platform for critics, bullies, and worse. It used to be that players could hardly avoid talking to one another for long stretches on planes and buses, if only because the other options were relatively minimal. It is easier now to retreat into the world of oneself.
Perhaps we are living in a golden age of unhappiness. Rich Harvard Business School graduates are miserable; millennials are burned out; Trump supporters are unhappy; Trump opponents are in despair. Or perhaps people are no more unhappy than they ever were, and we are simply more likely to hear about it. (As a phrase, the age of anxiety is as old as the N.B.A.) The league has become, in many ways, a more humane place; on many teams, when players are struggling mentally or emotionally, they are encouraged to acknowledge and address it, at least privately. At the Sloan conference, Silver talked about how individual teams and the league are devoting more and more resources to helping players with mental-health issues. Some of the current and former players who have spoken publicly about their struggles with depression—DeMar DeRozan, Kevin Love, and Chris Bosh, among others—have been instrumental in helping to challenge the taboo against seeking help.
But there may also be a dynamic that Silver, who, as commissioner, was appointed by the league’s owners, and sits at the center of its labor and management conflicts, can only dance around: the unintended and complicated consequences of player empowerment. Silver and Simmons’s conversation began with a discussion of the debacle surrounding Anthony Davis’s failed trade request from the New Orleans Pelicans, which not only sunk his relationship with the team and its fans but may have torpedoed the chemistry of the players on the Los Angeles Lakers, the team that he had hoped to join, which currently consists of LeBron James and a bunch of younger, less famous guys, several of whom would have been sent to New Orleans in any deal. It was “a bit of a mess,” Silver admitted.
It is, of course, entirely reasonable for Davis to want to have a say in who employs him; it is also understandable that James would try to use the leverage that he has gained—and, as the N.B.A.’s most important player, surely deserves—in order to make the Lakers into a championship contender. (Davis is represented by an agency, Klutch Sports, founded by James’s good friend, Rich Paul; James’s fingerprints appeared to be all over Davis’s gambit.) For too long, N.B.A. owners took their title a little too literally; players had few rights and saw only a small share of the profits, and were told that they should be grateful because they made good money playing a child’s game. Now the N.B.A. is, increasingly, a players’ league, and Davis is an example of that. But power can be isolating.
What’s more, the opportunities and responsibilities that come with that power don’t always sit easily alongside the central job of an N.B.A. player. Earlier this season, Durant complained about media attention and launched a show about the business of sports—“The Boardroom,” on ESPN+—the same week. Kyrie Irving starred in a Hollywood movie during the off-season, and then, earlier this month, told reporters that he “didn’t really come into this game for there to be cameras in my face.” Both Irving and Durant—whose friendship has inspired speculation that they might wish to play together in the future, speculation that both players have described as unwelcome—have insisted that they just want to play basketball. You could say that they are being hypocritical, but the truth may be more complicated, and more illuminating. It can’t be easy to live simply as a human being while trying to be a brand and knowing that you are seen as a commodity.
On an episode of James’s HBO show, “The Shop”—one of his brand vehicles—Davis explained his decision to request a trade as evidence that he is “growing up.” “As a player, as the C.E.O. of my own business, I got the power,” he said. “I’m doing what I want to do, and not what somebody tells me to do.” No one blinks these days when a player calls himself the C.E.O. of his own brand; we are all brands now, supposedly. But, for N.B.A. players, that postmodern axiom is much more real than it is for most of us. It is also awkwardly at odds with the collectivity of teamwork. Brands don’t have teammates. They don’t even really have friends. The identity of a brand is, quite literally, defined by how the public sees it. It must make for a peculiar kind of loneliness to feel obliged to see yourself this way, too.
