Boardroom Talks<\/em>,<\/a> sitting down with Speedy Morman after Morman asked whether younger players will start looking up to global stars like the Los Angeles Lakers\u2019 Doncic instead of the Americans who built the league.<\/p>\n\u201cBecause he\u2019s that great. They should get it from him,\u201d Durant said. \u201cI love when guys want to be like Luka or Michael Jordan or try to emulate them. When you go work out and get as close as you can to that level, you\u2019re going to be a good player.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy not?\u201d He added: \u201cI love to see Luka, from a different country, crossing people up like we do. He\u2019s bringing that back to where he\u2019s from. That\u2019s a little piece of us there, too, the American culture of basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
The numbers support what Durant is describing. NBAStore.com jersey sales were up 21% in the period following his trade to the Lakers, compared with the same period a year earlier. And he stayed at or near the top of the league\u2019s sales list the following season, finishing second only to Curry for 2025-26. <\/p>\n
The trade rose national NBA viewership by 16%, while average purchase prices for Lakers home games rose 19%, according to TickPick. The Mavericks\u2019 average ticket price, by contrast, fell 40% once he left, and the team ended up offering fans refunds amid the backlash. <\/p>\n
A Betsson <\/em>study of the 2020-2025 period ranked Doncic the second-most influential European player behind only Giannis, while giving him the single highest fan-sentiment score of anyone measured, at 62%.<\/p>\nJordan is the obvious historical comparison for that kind of pull on a single market. He led the NBA in merchandise sales every season from 1989-90 through the end of his career, accounting for roughly a quarter of all league jersey sales during the 1990s. Fortune <\/em>estimated that he was responsible for $3.1 billion in increased sales of NBA-licensed products. <\/p>\nFortune\u2019s <\/em>often-cited 1998 estimate put Jordan\u2019s broader economic footprint, TV rights fees, gate receipts, merchandise, and endorsements combined, at roughly $10 billion, a number that became shorthand for \u201cthe Jordan Effect\u201d. League-wide NBA revenue grew from $165 million in his rookie season to $2.75 billion by his final retirement. <\/p>\nSimply put, Doncic\u2019s rise isn\u2019t separate from American basketball culture, but an extension of it. And Doncic himself has been enamored by it for a long time. Long before he ever set foot on an NBA hardwood, his basketball education happened miles away at Real Madrid\u2019s academy. Yet, the player he idolized most growing up wasn\u2019t European at all. It was Kobe Bryant.<\/p>\n
As for the Jordan parallel, Doncic would be happy to hear it. LeBron James has earlier said that he tried to make Doncic the debut athlete of his own \u201cTeam LeBron\u201d line at Nike, only for Doncic to instead sign with Michael Jordan\u2019s own imprint in December 2019, becoming the first European-born player to do so.<\/p>\n
\u00a0In December 2025, ahead of the launch of his Luka 5 signature shoe, he told Forbes his own game was shaped by watching Jordan long before he ever played in the NBA. \u201cI grew up idolizing MJ,\u201d he said. \u201cI idolized the way he played, his competitiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
That said, the two eras used different media and different scales of money, but they\u2019re tracking the same thing: one player moving jersey sales, TV numbers, and ticket prices for an entire league. It\u2019s all about the kind of measurable commercial pull that only a handful of players in NBA history have ever produced.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Read More<\/a> Diego Volkman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Basketball The last time a player other than LeBron James or Stephen Curry topped the NBA\u2019s official jersey sales list was 2012-13, when Carmelo Anthony held the spot for the New York Knicks. That 11-year streak ended in 2024-25, and an American didn\u2019t break it. Luka Doncic became the first international player in league history […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":930175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124942,3681,31489,523],"tags":[16302],"class_list":["post-930174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","category-basketball","category-durant","category-kevin","tag-nba"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/930175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}