There’s a basic profile of what a typical NBA player’s life was like before he made it to the league that a lot of people carry around in their heads. It runs something like the LeBron James story, involving a black kid from a broken home using basketball as a way out of poverty. And sometimes that bears out. But over at the New York Times, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz used a combination of US Census data, birth records from the CDC, and basketball-reference.com data to calculate the probability getting to the NBA from every county in the United States. The results were antithetical to the standard Biggie Smalls line of thought.
Growing up in a wealthy neighborhood is a “major, positive predictor” for playing in the NBA, even accounting for kids of former players. Black NBA players are an estimated 30 percent less likely to be born to either an unmarried or teenage mother, and they are 50 percent less likely to have a “distinctively black” name—this has been found to be a strong indicator for low-income black families, but the research doesn’t show it has any effect on later life outcomes. (To be clear: we’re talking about broad population effects, not individual families.)
From 1960 to 1990, nearly half of blacks were born to unmarried parents. I would estimate that during this period roughly twice as many black N.B.A. players were born to married parents as unmarried parents. In other words, for every LeBron James, there was a Michael Jordan, born to a middle-class, two-parent family in Brooklyn, and a Chris Paul, the second son of middle-class parents in Lewisville, N.C., who joined Mr. Paul on an episode of “Family Feud” in 2011.