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Michael Jordan is hanging in the air. It’s 1998, in Salt Lake City, and he’s just released the most famous shot of his career. As the ball sails through the net, the court is full of iconic characters. Dennis Rodman is 37. Karl Malone is 34. John Stockton is 36. Scottie Pippen is 32. Jordan himself is 35. Steve Kerr is 32. Jeff Hornacek is 35. Antoine Carr is 36. The youngest men on the floor are Toni Kukoc, 29, and Bryon Russell, 27.
The average age of the 10 players on the court at that moment is 33.3. Eight of the 10 are over 30. None are 26 or younger.
Fast-forward to June 2026. OG Anunoby is flying through the air. It’s Game 4 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, and history is unfolding again. Jalen Brunson just missed a deep 3, and Anunoby has tipped the rebound toward the basket. He’s 28. Brunson is 29. Mikal Bridges and Landry Shamet are also 29. Karl-Anthony Towns is 30. Opposing them, De’Aaron Fox is 28. Devin Vassell is 25. Victor Wembanyama is 22. Stephon Castle is 21. Dylan Harper is just 20.
The average age of the 10 players on the floor at that moment is 26.1. None of them are older than 30. Four of them are 26 or younger.
Two possessions can’t tell an entire story, but these legendary moments capture a tectonic shift in the best basketball league in the world. The NBA has become a young man’s game. In the 1998 playoffs, dudes 30 and older accounted for half of all postseason playing time. In 2026, that share was down to just 22.8 percent, the lowest on record.
LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Kevin Durant have defied the norms around basketball longevity, but they’re anomalies. Around them, the NBA rank and file is trending younger. Players in their early 20s account for a growing share of the league, while players in their 30s are losing ground.
During the 2025-26 regular season, players 30 and older made up just 17.5 percent of the NBA. That’s the lowest share in at least 30 years. Meanwhile, for the seventh straight season, more than half the league (54.6 percent) was 25 or younger. In 1997-98, that number was just 36 percent.
This isn’t just a matter of teams stuffing the ends of their benches with prospects instead of veterans. When you map playing time by age, the top-line takeaway remains: Today’s NBA is no country for old men. Last season, for the first time in modern history, players 30 and older accounted for less than 20 percent of NBA minutes (19.8 percent).
The 1990s were a kinder and gentler time for aging players. Games were slower and more compact. They featured less transition offense and more downtime. From 1995-96 through 2001-02, players 30 and older logged more minutes than every player under 25 combined, every single season. But that hasn’t happened since. Last season, the under-25 crowd played twice as many minutes as the 30-and-over crowd.
The NBA’s great youth movement has been building for decades, but for most of the 21st century, it was largely a regular-season phenomenon. Now we’re seeing the young dudes own the postseason, too.
In 1998, the year of Jordan’s iconic shot in Salt Lake City, players 30 and older logged 50.6 percent of all playoff minutes, while players under 25 got just 11.4 percent. That’s more than four to one. Young players slowly closed the gap through the 2000s and then briefly passed the veterans in 2008-09, when the Orlando Magic (led by a 23-year-old Dwight Howard) faced off against the Los Angeles Lakers (led by 30-year-old Kobe and 28-year-old Pau Gasol) in the NBA Finals. Then the veterans took the lead back and kept it for 13 straight postseasons.
In recent years, that has flipped. The lines crossed again in 2022-23, and last spring the divergence was the widest it has been in the modern era: Players under 25 logged 34.6 percent of playoff minutes, and players 30 and older logged just 22.8 percent, the lowest share in at least 30 years.
In each of the past two Finals, only two of the 10 players who logged the most minutes were 30 or older. In 1998, eight were.
And, finally, the 2026 postseason offered this stunning stat: Among the 25 players who logged the most playoff minutes, only three were older than 30: Tobias Harris, James Harden, and Josh Hart. In the 2025 playoffs, there were just two: Pascal Siakam and Alex Caruso.
The data is screaming that the NBA is a young man’s game, but it doesn’t tell us why. So I asked some executives around the league to help me understand.
One person I spoke to suggested that better training methods before the NBA are helping rookies and other early-career players contribute at a higher level.
Young players today are more skilled than ever—just look at the Spurs and Thunder. Wembanyama is 22, and he’s already ranked no. 1 on The Ringer’s Top 100, just over three years after his NBA debut. While elements of Wembanyama’s game remain unpolished, he arrived as one of the most versatile big men in the league. At 7-foot-4, he can dribble, pass, and shoot. That sentence would have been absurd in 1998; Antoine Carr didn’t have a Euro, you guys.
Wemby’s teammates Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle are even younger than he is, and they already represent one of the best backcourts in the NBA. His main rival in OKC, Chet Holmgren, is just 24 and also blends size and skill in unprecedented ways. San Antonio and Oklahoma City—two of the league’s most forward-thinking organizations—epitomize this broader trend. Both have stockpiled draft capital and shied away from big investments in older free agents. Both feature rotations built almost exclusively around dudes in their 20s. But they are hardly alone in leaning on young players for major contributions.
Last season, Charlotte’s Kon Knueppel became the first rookie ever to lead the league in made 3s. He was 20. Cam Boozer, Memphis’s 19-year-old rookie forward, ranks eighth in the NBA in rebounds per game for the Grizzlies. Then there is Cooper Flagg, who looks like one of the most complete forwards in the whole dang association. That dude is still 19.
As stylistic shifts have redefined the look and feel of the NBA, young players are arriving hip to the trends. They grew up in the world Curry, LeBron, and KD helped create. They have handles. They have stepbacks. They have Euro-steps. They hit corner 3s. Twenty years ago, these were luxury features, but now they come standard in many of the league’s freshest stars.
Another top executive pointed out that the style of play in the modern game is more conducive to young legs. The on-court trends of the day are pace, space, and crashing the boards—and let’s be honest, that shit is hard work. As another exec told me, “Older dudes don’t want to do that.”
The analytics movement has made the game spacier and faster. This all adds up to more sprints, accelerations, decelerations, jumps, landings, transition run-outs, defensive rotations, and switches. From a sports science perspective, the athletic demands of basketball are more arduous than ever.
Make no mistake, Jordan’s NBA was not easy. But those ’90s games were slower and more condensed than today’s wide-open tilts. The 1998 Finals clincher featured about 79 possessions per team and 20 3-point attempts total. Game 4 of the 2026 Finals had about 93 possessions per team, and the two teams launched 75 3s. Today’s players have more space to cover and more trips up and down the floor.
So what happens when older men chase around younger fellas for six months? They break, that’s what. As I wrote back in May, the NBA is experiencing massive upticks in leg injuries, a depressing trend that unfortunately has carried over into this season. Ben Simmons and Jalen Williams have already both suffered catastrophic lower-body injuries. And Jalen Suggs, Anthony Edwards, Jaren Jackson Jr., Kawhi Leonard, Tyrese Haliburton, and Chet Holmgren, among others, are also dealing with leg problems.
Unsurprisingly, these injuries disproportionately affect older players with more NBA mileage. As guys accumulate experience, their bodies also accrue wear and tear. And once the battle scars start to appear, a vicious cycle can set in. “The no. 1 predictor of a calf strain is a previous calf strain.” That’s what Dr. Richard Lieber, one of the world’s foremost experts on soft-tissue injuries, told me earlier this year.
The modern NBA is part basketball league and part war of attrition. The start of the new season has proved that nobody is immune to the “leg plague,” but on the whole, younger players are simply more sturdy. And the unfortunate reality is that injuries that players suffer earlier in their careers could have compounding effects later on.
When we look at the combination of the NBA’s absurd 82-game regular season, its intense two-month postseason grind, and the stylistic evolution of its gameplay, we see a landscape that’s nearly impossible to survive without both youth and luck. We used to say that the NBA regular season was “a marathon, not a sprint.” But the truth is that now it is both, and few athletes can withstand it, especially the older ones with nagging injuries.
And finally, there’s the money. The bedrock economic structures of the sport are much harder—and slower—to change than on-court tactics, which can be ushered in by enterprising players or innovative teams. Off the court, the league’s CBA is stricter than ever. The “second apron” is essentially operating as a hard cap. Overpaying for top talent is riskier than ever, and front offices are wary of “paying for past performance” rather than for future expectation.
Exacerbating this dynamic is the fact that as the NBA’s demographics shift younger, its pay scale continues to reward veterans. The biggest contracts—the 35-percent-of-the-cap maxes—are reserved for players with 10 or more years of service or who qualify for the supermax, which means that they mostly go to players at or past 30. For decades, that was seen as the cost of doing business. But the second apron changed the math. Now, overpaying top talent is akin to putting handcuffs on your front office: It robs front offices of vital team-building tools.
Consider this: Players 30 and above made up just 17.5 percent of the league’s player pool in 2025-26 but collected 32.6 percent of its total salary. Players under 25 made up 43.8 percent of the league and collected 23.6 percent of the money. In apron-era team building, an expensive 31-year-old who misses 30 games isn’t just a disappointment; he’s a toxic sunk cost. Young players are cheaper, are more durable, and still have upside. Under this CBA, they’re the best deal in the sport.
Otto Porter Jr. started the last three games of the 2022 Finals for the Golden State Warriors team, who won it all. He turned 29 between Games 1 and 2, which would’ve made him one of the younger players in that Jazz-Bull series in 1998. But in the 2020s, it made him vulnerable.
Porter played just 23 more games over the next two seasons, and then he was done. When he retired after 11 seasons, he didn’t blame his coaches or his role. “My body is not allowing me to play at the level that I expect of myself,” he said.
Porter isn’t alone. Malcolm Brogdon won Rookie of the Year in 2017 and Sixth Man of the Year in 2023. Last October, at 32, he was fighting for a roster spot in Knicks training camp, and instead of making the team, he retired. That same week, Charlotte waived Spencer Dinwiddie—also 32, and coming off four straight double-digit scoring seasons—to clear a guaranteed contract before opening night. Victor Oladipo, a two-time All-Star, hasn’t played an NBA game since he tore his patellar tendon in the 2023 playoffs at 30. Last month, he published an open letter asking teams for one more chance. That hasn’t come. He’s currently playing for Milwaukee’s G League affiliate.
Every case is different, but the macro-shifts in the NBA are compressing careers. Players like these would have stayed in the NBA until their mid-to-late 30s a generation ago. Not anymore. Whether because of wear and tear, contract considerations, or the evolution of what it takes to win in this league, 30 has become the new 35.
I first studied this trend in the wake of the trade that sent Giannis Antetokounmpo to the Heat. Miami’s newest superstar is nearly 32. He won two MVP awards and an NBA title during his mid-20s, but as he crossed into his 30s, his body became less reliable. This chart shows his missed time over the course of his career.
Antetokounmpo makes $58 million per year, which translates to over 35 percent of the salary cap. Miami traded several young players and multiple draft assets to acquire him. Springtime reports that suggested that both San Antonio and Oklahoma City might also be interested in trading for Antetokounmpo never seemed credible—in reality, acquiring a maxed-out superstar who’s over 30 seems antithetical to the team-building strategies of both organizations, where youth, draft picks, and cost-controlled deals are sacred and blockbuster trades and free agent splashes are passé. The Spurs’ current roster includes only two players older than Antetokounmpo. Ditto for the Thunder’s.
It’s not 1998 anymore. To paraphrase Rick Pitino, Benjamin Button is not walking through that door. Older dudes are the new midrange jumper.
The last time Giannis appeared in the Finals, he scored 50 points in a triumphant win. He was 26 and the best player in the world. Now he’s nearly 32, but Pat Riley and Miami’s front office are still betting that a thin, top-heavy roster with an aging superstar will help them contend for championships. It might, but the early returns are not great. Miami has started this season 2-5, with lopsided losses to younger, deeper teams in Minnesota, Charlotte, Detroit, and L.A.
The Heat traded depth, youth, and draft assets for one aging superstar. Maybe it will work out. Or maybe Larry O’Brien is taking his talents elsewhere.
Kirk Goldsberry
Kirk Goldsberry is the New York Times–bestselling author of ‘Sprawlball.’ He previously served as the vice president of strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs and as the lead analyst of Team USA Basketball. He’s also the executive director of the Business of Sports Institute at the University of Texas. He lives in Austin.
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