Austin Rivers, who played for seven teams over an 11-year NBA career, is only 32. In other words, he’s a little young for rants. Yet there he was on his podcast, , last year, declaring:
“Highlight culture has killed the game of basketball.”
He’s not alone. His sentiment, shared by countless coaches at every level of basketball, is simple: Young players, driven by the rush for attention and social media clout, are now too interested in producing viral moments and not interested enough in playing the game the “right way.” Call up any YouTube highlight reel and you’ll see a parade of difficult off-the-dribble threes and celebrations after dunks. Extra passes that find the open man and diving attempts for loose balls … not so much.
One of the biggest platforms for the modern highlight-driven hooper is Overtime, the social media content upstart that has exploded since its launch in 2016 thanks to, primarily, short-form content capturing young players in action. A 10-minute video of Zion Williamson’s final high school game from ’18 has more than six million views on YouTube, for instance. So, in 2021, when Overtime launched Overtime Elite, a league for 16-to-19-year-olds initially positioned as an alternative for kids who didn’t want to play college basketball, plenty of people in the basketball world were skeptical. Was this the latest encroachment of highlight culture on a sport that desperately needed improvement to its youth development system?
Corey Frazier, who is now Overtime Elite’s head of player development, was coaching for the Bradley Beal Elite AAU team when he was first approached by OTE. “The first question I asked, which I’m sure [was] everybody else’s, was, ‘Is this just gonna be a bunch of highlights and people dunking?’ ” he says.
Instead, OTE, now in its fourth year, has become perhaps the best development program for young talent in the United States. In the past three NBA drafts, four alums have been top-10 picks—the same number as Kentucky, which has the most of any NCAA program. In May an Overtime Elite U-18 team went to Berlin to compete at the Adidas Next Generation tournament and won two of its three games, beating powerhouse European clubs Barcelona and Alba Berlin. And those leading the program believe they’re just getting started.
“I’m constantly listening to people and their gripes about high school basketball development,” OTE head of competition Damien Wilkins says. “We try to implement those things here to make it a place that has literally no weaknesses.”