All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Tonight Drake will take the stage at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn to hand out the official NBA Style Award to Russell Westbrook, Dwyane Wade, or Iman Shumpert. Decided by a fan vote, the trophy will mark the first time the NBA will recognize in its official capacity how important “style” has become to making the league relevant and successful.
Unofficially, the league’s benefitted from its players’ style ever since the Iverson-induced dress code led to post-game pressers into runway shows. We—hoops fans, GQ, menswear fiends—have spent a decade now tracking what players wear, endlessly roasting their outfits on Twitter, converting them from ballers to fashion-magazine cover stars, watching them link up with brands to model and eventually collaborate with on product and, in some cases, even launch their own lines.
“We’re all paying attention to it,” says Calyann Barnett, Dwyane Wade’s stylist and creative director. “It’s just as important now as the best dunk, the best ankle break, whatever else they do in basketball.” So when the NBA announced its first-ever NBA Awards Show, it made sense that—alongside handing out perennial trophies like the regular-season MVP and Rookie of the Year, plus ESPY-type awards for the year’s best dunk, block, assist, and game winner—they’d include a Best Dressed yearbook superlative in the mix. The NBA has exploded in part because it’s a sport tailor-made for the Internet; it’s filled with millions of snackable moments, whether that’s a monster dunk or Russ going full Desert Storm Swerve. You don't have to care about the game itself anymore to be an NBA fan—not when the fits are this outrageous and the memes are strafing across your timeline. Even if you don’t know Steph Curry from green curry, you probably still enjoyed roasting the former’s signature shoes.
Good on the league for being savvy enough to cash in on its players' fashion sense. The public's already having this conversation around the 2017 version of a water cooler—I don’t know, an Ace Hotel lobby selling reclaimed-wood fidget spinners? Even the players are jockeying for style supremacy. Now the NBA gets to more directly claim a stake in a game that's only ever been played off court. And in doing so, it's giving players, brands, and fans a scorecard. People care about this, deeply.
NBA style has always been built on some impassioned conversation, and that's before Charles Barkley gets in his old-man rants. Barnett remembers dressing Wade for the 2009 All-Star game in an outfit designed to be a distraction: a yellow cardigan and yellow matching bow tie. This was pre-basketball-Twitter, so he was spared a roast-fest, but at the time Barnett received something much more terrifying: phone calls. “Why are you doing this? That’s not the way he’s supposed to look!” Barnett recalls friends shouting into the phone.
And what Wade, Shump, and Russ have in common as NBA Style Award nominees isn't just that they dress well—it's that they dress well and do it loudly. “They picked three guys who are very divisive,” says Megan Ann Wilson, a stylist who works with the NBA’s Andre Drummond, Chris Douglas-Roberts, and Wesley Johnson. “They picked three people that, no matter who wins, people are going to talk about it.” This is what the NBA wants! More players on fashion-magazine covers. More Twitter jawing and, sure, roasting. It all raises the Q-rating of the league. It's the opposite tack of the NFL, a league that goes out of its way to downplay the individual as subordinate to the shield. When an NBA player gets bigger, the league gets bigger.
Question is, do NBA players care about the Style Award? Stylists Barnett and Wilson say that players already track what colleagues are wearing—Wilson was recently working with a player who turned down a particular jacket because Wade made waves in it—and what spots they’re landing with magazines or brands. A shiny trophy from the fans, sanctioned by the league, should only add fuel to the fire. “There’s definitely going to be a hunger for it,” says Barnett. “These guys are competitors by nature, so you put an award in front of them…” She laughs.
But that's the theory. Reality may be different. This is the NBA's first attempt at an awards ceremony. There's no guarantee it delivers the sheen of cool this particular award needs to be meaningful. Wilson agrees with Barnett that players will want to win, but she hasn’t heard anything about it from her clients. Los Angeles Clippers point guard Chris Paul, one of the league’s reigning style stars and a man who’s besties with Wade and LeBron, tells me he’s not very familiar with the award. He just collaborated with Five Four and has been trading texts with James Harden, Carmelo Anthony, and Wade, who are all abroad at Fashion Week. They all know who's showing up on a cover, who's dropping in on Milan Fashion Week, who's rocking what. These guys care. Paul doesn't see anyone outright lobbying for the award. “I don’t know who’s going to wear something all season long to win the award,” says Paul. “Hopefully guys got more goals than that.”
Ultimately, the trophy's more an honor for the unsung heroes of the NBA’s fashion-world ascendance: the stylists. Even if they won't admit it, either. Two stylists I spoke to won’t admit to being that concerned, and another said she hadn’t yet heard of the award. Not a great sign. Barnett says the nomination is a great acknowledgement of the work she and Wade have done together. And yet: "I can sit down and say I helped change the face of the NBA," she tells me, "so I don’t need an award.”
