It may be that even for us, fans of basketball, the name Overtime Elite might sound unknown. Overtime Elite is a new professional basketball league for top prospects between the ages of 16 and 18. The OTE league targets and employ top-ranked young players, the top of the elite among the youngest talents. The league offers these kids health insurance, signing bonuses and the ability to profit from their name, image and likeness, in exchange for their NCAA eligibility.
"Elite athletes are trying to hack the system,” OTE commissioner and president Aaron Ryan said in a Zoom interview. “[OTE] is a global super league and an academic accelerator to address three things: basketball development, academics … [and] what’s really the game changer for us in addition to those things is economic empowerment.”
Every aspect of this league is amazing, the board is formed by NBA players and basketball ultra-specialist executives and they have only one goal. Make sure the kids are ready to go pro, and when they picked at the draft, they will hit the floor running and have a longer “peak career”.
Many College-aged players are thankful for having a sort of way to circumvent the NCAA, and institution that at the beginning heavily criticized the OTE. The league is seen as a replacement and a more professional version of the short-lived Junior Basketball Association launched in 2018, which had similar goals but ended up going belly up due to management issues.
The Overtime Elite League was founded in 2016 and rose to the ranks of professional basketball by publishing basketball highlights and interviews. Ryan said its videos garner almost two billion views per month.Former NBA commissioner David Stern was one of Overtime’s earliest investors before his death last year. Soon after 2016, a huge technical board was formed and investors started to show an interest like there was no tomorrow, thus leading the league to a ginormous business model. The board goal is to grow well beyond the most prominent soccer academies in countries like Spain and Portugal not limiting themselves to the US alone but going global by 2023.
That’s another tentacle (league) of the NBA working for the sport we love so dearly and we wanted to make sure our STREETOPIA readers knew every aspect of it.
