Teen hoops players are paid $100K salaries. The goal? A new path to the NBA.
LOS ANGELES — The most interesting basketball game in Atlanta on a Friday night in March wasn't the one played in the city's downtown NBA arena. It was happening three miles north, between six-figure-earning teenagers in a gym that opened only seven months earlier as part of a league that didn't exist one year before and whose primary audience couldn't watch the action unfold live.
Tipoff of the second game of a playoff series to determine the inaugural champion of Overtime Elite, a three-team league featuring some of the country's top players from ages 16 to 18, was still hours away when Ausar Thompson stopped by an always open snack bar on the first floor of the league's headquarters.
Emerging from his team's shoot-around, he grabbed a bowl of proteins and grains on his way to rest and prepare in the league-provided apartment he shared with his identical twin, Amen, and another league player in the upscale Atlantic Station neighborhood nearby.
"I'm confident," he said of his team's chances.
A 6-foot-6 wing with preternatural playmaking and impeccable manners, whose skills one league staffer breathlessly compared to the athleticism of Russell Westbrook and passing of Jason Kidd, Thompson was raised in San Leandro, Calif., began high school in Florida and once considered taking the conventional route to reach his NBA dream. Kentucky was his school of choice, though Florida State had impressed as well.
Then last year, recruiters called the brothers touting an attractive yet unproven alternative known
