The NBA Draft Sets Prospects Up to Brick

Expectations for the NBA Draft have gotten so high that players dress horribly to stand out.

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Complex Original

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First impressions are important. For the 19 NBA prospects who have been invited to Thursday’s NBA draft, this is the start of their professional careers. It’s also one of the first impressions a mainstream audience will get to a player’s personal style, something that the NBA and its players have hung their hat on over the past couple years. The draft has always been a platform for players to assert they are more stylish than their peers—think LeBron James and his white suit or Jalen Rose and his infamous red ensemble—but lately it’s become an unwinnable situation for prospects.

As NBA style becomes more of a topic among mainstream fans, prospects are forced to do a lot more to catch the eye of an audience. “There's definitely more pressure and sometimes guys just want to be weird for the sake of weird and they want to get as much attention as possible,” Megan Ann Wilson, an athlete stylist who has worked with Andre Drummond, Wesley Johnson, and Stanley Johnson, tells Complex. 

Wilson says this in reference to current NBA players, but she notes that some of this mentality carries over to draft night. She mentions current Los Angeles Clipper Wesley Johnson, who wore a full-out double breasted suit with plaid pants on his draft night in 2010, as someone who was simply looking to make a splash. “He just wanted to make a statement and he thought it was cool," Wilson says.

In a world where the press goes to the weirdest, and not always the best, dressed, like Oklahoma City Thunder guard Russell Westbrook and Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade, prospects need to do a lot to set themselves apart from the field they are about to enter.

The stage demands that they dress in a way that will most likely get them trolled, but ask Westbrook, who Twitter has roasted on numerous occasions, how that’s worked out for him. He’s scored a collaboration with Barney’s, started his own sunglass line, and is a spokesperson for True Religion. The NBA draft is the launching pad for an NBA career that is intertwined with one in the fashion industry.

“For the ones who want to make fashion a part of their career, it's really the right stage to set-up that fashion influence down the road,” Wilson says. But you can’t just dress nicely and expect that the attention will follow.

The NBA Draft sets these players up for failure because you have to go beyond that. Just look at how much press former New York Knick and current Phoenix Sun Tyson Chandler, a legitimately stylish, if not the most stylish NBA player, received for dressing well compared to those like Westbrook. All press is good press, as the old axiom goes.

And these players are being thrown onto a platform they probably aren’t ready for.  “There's definitely more pressure because a lot of these kids are kind of expected to come out fully ready and fully stylish and have a full brand and it's really what's going to define them over the next couple of years,” Wilson says. NBA prospects have this pressure at a very young age, and one where they probably haven’t defined their personal style.

“They don’t really have that experience of having to dress up on a world stage and going amateur to professional,” Wilson explains.

Yet this doesn’t stop the pressure from being on these players—and what a player wears has only become a bigger focus now that we practically know who is going to be drafted days in advance. All the eyeballs are on these players as they attempt to navigate the first moments of their professional careers. “There’s Instagram, Snapchat, NBA Style hashtags, all that crap,” Wilson says. “In some ways, I feel like we've reached peak-NBA style.”

And if we’ve reached the peak, there’s really nowhere to go but down. But with all the pressure on the players to top those who’ve come before then and a sudden armory of expensive clothing and accessories at their disposal, NBA prospects are given every opportunity to brick it.

“Now you have custom clothiers that will come and give them a cut just to have them wear their apparel,” Wilson explains. “There's a lot more opportunities for them to be more confident even if they're not a suit and tie person.”

It’s confidence that makes NBA players think they can pull off anything in the world. The problem is that they can’t. 

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