LOS ANGELES — The most interesting basketball game in Atlanta on a Friday night in March wasn’t the one played in the city’s downtown NBA arena. It was happening three miles north, between six-figure-earning teenagers in a gym that opened only seven months earlier as part of a league that didn’t exist one year before and whose primary audience couldn’t watch the action unfold live.
Tipoff of the second game of a playoff series to determine the inaugural champion of Overtime Elite, a three-team league featuring some of the country’s top players from ages 16 to 18, was still hours away when Ausar Thompson stopped by an always open snack bar on the first floor of the league’s headquarters.
Emerging from his team’s shoot-around, he grabbed a bowl of proteins and grains on his way to rest and prepare in the league-provided apartment he shared with his identical twin, Amen, and another league player in the upscale Atlantic Station neighborhood nearby.
“I’m confident,” he said of his team’s chances.
A 6-foot-6 wing with preternatural playmaking and impeccable manners, whose skills one league staffer breathlessly compared to the athleticism of Russell Westbrook and passing of Jason Kidd, Thompson was raised in San Leandro, Calif., began high school in Florida and once considered taking the conventional route to reach his NBA dream. Kentucky was his school of choice, though Florida State had impressed as well.
Then last year, recruiters called the brothers touting an attractive yet unproven alternative known by its three initials: OTE.
At the time, the New York-based social media company Overtime, founded in 2016, could only provide blueprints of a still-under-construction league to launch in the fall of 2021. Players would attend an in-house school and earn Georgia-accredited diplomas. They would earn guaranteed salaries of at least $100,000 and be provided with financial support if players wanted to later attend college as a student. The biggest selling point was basketball.
“We both wanted to go to college,” Ausar said. “But then we realized that we could get a lot better in this year than we would have gotten in high school.”
He arrived at that idea because of the three-story league headquarters the size of a city block where players could access a state-of-the-art show court, two practice courts, weight rooms rivaling an NBA practice facility, and coaches with NBA and college experience.
They were only the third and fourth players to commit, and by taking the salary they elected to forgo their NCAA eligibility should the best-laid plans not work out. Joining, Amen Thompson recalled, was a “leap of faith.”
“You just had to like, really trust them,” he said. “And then they actually ended up doing what they said they were going to do.”
Just as the Thompsons believed their best route to the NBA went through Overtime Elite, the league was founded on a conviction that millions of Gen Z, cord-cutter and cord-never users — and the brands that covet that demographic — would follow those journeys through social media, one post at a time.
Overtime chief executive Dan Porter wouldn’t say how much it cost to get the league up and running. “I can say,” he added, “it cost us a gallon of blood, two gallons of sweat and three gallons of tears.”
In transforming from a theoretical league to proof-of-concept, OTE has become one of American sports’ most closely watched experiments. Overtime had attracted investors such as a fund run by Jeff Bezos, along with Carmelo Anthony, Drake, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, but observers say its league’s first year legitimized the basketball side by offering evidence it could develop its top-level talent. It could affect your favorite alma mater’s recruiting class, or develop your favorite NBA team’s future rookie.
“It’s their first year, and at the end of the day, there are going to be growing pains,” said one NBA scout who had watched Overtime Elite play and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I came away thinking that it was better than I thought it would be.”
Along with the two-year-old G League Ignite, the NBA-sponsored team that signs high school graduates and tutors them for one year before they become eligible for the draft, Overtime has shown it can be a “disruptor” to the NCAA, said Jay Bilas, the ESPN college basketball analyst.
