Person of Interest: Blake Griffin

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Stardom in the NBA runs through two distinct but intertwined economies. At the top is a championship economy, in which a player can only be gauged by his ability to collect rings. The feeder for the championship economy comes from the league's highlight reels and never-ending excitement over Tremendous Upside Potential. Most NBA superstars pay their dues in the highlight economy before graduating to the bulletproof status of being "champions." In fact, when a player in the highlight economy doesn't graduate, he is branded a selfish disappointment, the gift from God who refused to give back to the city that worshipped him. All this is obvious — it's how fans and the media have judged players for years. Isaiah Rider is x. Bruce Bowen is y. Can Carmelo Anthony be y, or is he, like Tracy McGrady before him, just another brilliant x who perpetually teased us with an imminent but never actualized transformation?

 

Over the past decade, those lines have been blurred by a new way of watching basketball. There are now players whose contributions to the highlight economy are so visibly staggering and so efficiently distributed that these athletes take on a different sort of superstardom. The expectations of graduation come almost immediately — once enough people have watched your videos on YouTube, some of them are going to say, "It doesn't mean anything until he wins a championship." Vince Carter was a prototype for the new hype — a year after breaking the dunk contest, Vinsanity took the Raptors to the East semifinals, where he lost to Allen Iverson's Sixers in one of the most thrilling playoff series of the last 25 years. Famously, on the morning of Game 7, Vince flew to Chapel Hill to walk in his college graduation ceremony. Twelve hours later, he finished a stinker of a game by missing a 20-footer at the buzzer. The media immediately questioned Vince's commitment to basketball while lauding Iverson's determination, and the storyline for both men's careers were set. Iverson now gets more credit for hauling that Sixers team to the Finals than most players get for actually winning a championship, while Vince — fairly — has become the icon for aimless basketball talent.

 

Vince was 24 years old in 2001. Since then, the path between the highlight economy and the championship economy has become both steeper and shorter. Players used to be allowed five, six years within the highlight economy before their desire/ability to win came into question. Now, the timetable lasts about two years.The arrival of Blake Griffin — the man who made "Timofey" an acceptable spelling of "Timothy" — has supercharged the highlight hype machine. He has played exactly 100 NBA games. Before this season started, several pundits were calling him one of the best players in the NBA, including ESPN's preseason #NBARank, which listed him at no. 10.

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