All images via Alan Chazaro
Dr. Dre’s The Chronic being listed as one of the best Bay Area rap albums is why Alan Chazaro doesn’t trust anything generated by AI.
When Dink Pate — an 18-year-old future NBA Lottery Pick from Pleasant Grove, Dallas — became the youngest player in U.S. history to go pro, he didn’t expect to end up balling out in Mexico. But as the fate of the basketball deities would have it, the Reebok-endorsed, 6-foot-8 point guard who models his game after Afernee Hardaway and LeBron James recently chose la República Mexicana as his stomping grounds.
Pate could’ve opted to distribute his skills elsewhere, in a better equipped sanctuary for hoopers like the University of Kentucky (whom he received an offer from) or a professional organization with more basketball credibility (he certainly got calls from general managers aplenty). But he chose Mexico. Why? After one season with the G League Ignite (the NBA’s premier youth development program that recently folded), he felt Mexico would provide him with the next best opportunity to further his career by playing alongside NBA veterans and journeymen, while providing an international experience and spotlight that he would never have gotten playing in Greensboro or any other G League city while awaiting to become age eligible for the NBA in 2025.
I had the pleasure of meeting up with Pate, the incoming star of the Capitanes de Ciudad de México, which is the NBA G League’s sole Latin American-based squad where he’ll suit up for one season. We met at the center of the swarming Aztec capital as he flashed his grill and chain for an upcoming SLAM feature (shameless plug: check out that upcoming issue for the photos and interview). There, he told me about his love for Mexico, a country barely removed from his hometown in Texas.
Here’s something that didn’t make the SLAM story: while photographing him, a young Mexican girl and her mom, along with an elderly man, curiously looked on. The girl, who sat nearby us, eventually gathered the courage to ask me, in Spanish, if Dink was a basketball player (he had been wearing his team’s practice jersey and stood towering above everyone else, after all). She kindly wondered if she could take a picture with him — again, without a trace of English.
Good reader, when I tell you that I’ve never seen an adolescent Mexican girl get excited about basketball in all of my years traveling between the U.S. and Mexico, I mean that this moment, in the smallest sense, felt important. The perception and visibility of the sport, particularly for younger generations, has shifted into the mainstream. Translation: Basketball mania has officially and unequivocally arrived in Mexico.
The reasons are manifold. As a for-profit business, the Association has had their sights locked on Mexico as a gateway into the Latin American market for some time. Since 1992, when the Houston Rockets knocked off the Dallas Mavericks in an exhibition match, the NBA has had a steadily increasing presence in Mexico. Horacio Llamas further galvanized Mexican hoop heads when he became the first Mexican-born player to make his ascension to the league in 1997 with the Phoenix Suns. Two decades later, dudes like Juan Toscano-Anderson and Jaime Jaquez Jr. — two U.S. players with dual citizenship as Mexican Americans — are helping to carry that legacy forward with their own flashes of Mexican pride.
The NBA has also strategically set up camp in Mexico with NBA Academy Latin America in San Luis Potosí and an official NBA store in the ritzy Polanco neighborhood. Dink (who will be starring in a docuseries, The Break, about his transition to life in Mexico) is the culmination of these forces. He’s the evolution of Brandon Jennings (who skipped college to hoop in Italy as a teen) and LaMelo Ball (who opted for Australia and Lithuania before entering the league) — a potentially generational player who is capitalizing on a surging cultural moment in a developing but nearby nation that is ready to embrace its Spalding hero.
Sure, fútbol and béisbol still respectively reign supreme among older generations and traditionalists. But for those closer to Dink’s age and sensibilities — ranging from Gen Z to millennials — there’s no doubt that básquetbol (or, el deporte ráfaga) is gaining ground quicker than a midcourt fastbreak.
You have to be here seeing it unfold in real-time to grasp the international magnitude of the game’s contemporary popularity. On the roof of Lust, a multi-level streetwear boutique in the ever-trendy Roma Norte neighborhood, where an Adidas-sponsored court was built to host capitalinos in semi-organized scrimmages (a la Rucker Park). Inside Arena CDMX in Azcapotzalco, a mostly residential, working-class outskirt on the northern side of the mega-urbanized sprawl, where former NBA vets like Kenneth Faried and Trey Burke lead the Capitanes in front of a raucous home crowd. In a historic gym baptized by the 1968 Olympics, the Diablos Rojos, the Liga Nacional de Baloncesto Profesional’s latest expansion darlings, now hoop. The team was founded earlier this year by a deeply-funded, dynastic baseball franchise in Mexico City dating back to 1940. The iconic baseball organization recognized the growing value of basquet, so pivoted into the Mexican basketball league this year. (Imagine Real Madrid expanding their operations into American football; that would feel revolutionary, right?).
Basketball is becoming a lifestyle. A mindset. It’s the way you lace up your sneakers. It’s the jersey you wear. It’s the growing influence of pick up games and street courts that have become inescapable throughout CDMX — North America’s largest metropolis, where 22,281,00 Mexicanos reside. Yes, this is 30 years post-Jordan, 20 years post-LeBron. But the thing about Mexico is that there is always a lag for trends to reach their full state here — infrastructurally, economically, culturally, socially. In visiting Mexico as the son of Mexican immigrants throughout each phase of my life dating back to the late 80s, it has always been that way. Whenever a new movie would come out back home in California, it felt like it would take months for that movie to appear on screen in Mexico (this is before the internet, of course). It takes time for anything in this country to catch on, to build, to spread. But for the younger generations with social media, basketball is finally starting to catch fire.
Mexican hoop culture has become unlike anything it has ever been — with flashes of influence from the U.S. but idiosyncratic in its surreal elements, too. Renovated courts have flourished, enlivened by local muralists (funded by brands like Hennessy, Nike, Pigalle, Adidas, and the NBA). At the street level, endless bootleg merch abounds at outdoor tianguis; I saw a replica Lu Dort jersey this week. And that’s not even counting the scenes outside of Mexico City — parochial adult leagues in small villages, underground cash-prize tournaments, the works. In Leon, a shoe-factory was converted into a makeshift house of hoops for children. In Xalapa, “El Nido de Halcones” (the Hawk’s Nest) has just been constructed as a paragon of basketball worship. In Guadalajara, LaVar Ball was slanging Big Baller Brand shirts with a Mexican flag on it while his son, LiAngelo, played for the Astros de Jalisco — opportunistic, to be sure, but still a sign of basketball’s untapped revenue streams awaiting beneath the border.
As a whole, Mexico ranks as the 10th most populous nation on the globe with 130 million bodies. Mexico also boasts the largest group of Spanish speakers in the world. As of last NBA season, Mexico ranked ninth among international NBA League Pass subscriptions and fifth among NBA Finals viewership. You can do the math on the NBA’s market size (and still-dormant potential) here.
I have endless memories of visiting Mexico as a child, adolescent, teen and adult. My first glimpse of Mexico’s basketball affair was in 2005, when the local team in my parents’ hometown — los Halcones de Xalapa, Veracruz — were on their way to building a championship dynasty behind UCLA’s Lorenzo Mata and future Mexican league star, Orlando Mendez. Ever since then, I’ve observed how the sport has continued to thrive, often in the least expected places. Whether in the remote mountains of southern Oaxaca or the tequila-saturated, cobblestone roads of Jalisco, I’ve noticed that it’s not only about the NBA’s star power here. It’s about the sheer love of the sport, on a strictly regional level. And that happens to be most evident at the country’s epicenter: El Distrito Federal.
Mexico City’s distinct mixture of cultural vibrancy, cosmopolitan energy, international allure, fashion sensibility, size and scale, access to resources, celebrity gravitas, and acumen in sports, among other factors (hell, it’s the only place that can claim a Michelin-starred street taquero, for whatever that’s worth), make it the ideal nexus for an unorthodox basketball revolution. Here, there’s a locally-led effort to put Mexican basketball on the map.
No entity is harnessing this chaotically evolving Mexican virtue in sports better than los Diablos Rojos. The energized squad is killing it right now — both on and off the court. They’ve paired up with brands like New Era, Machina and Almor for streetwear drops and host events all over the city for fans and hoopers. As newcomers to LNBP, the Mexican pro circuit’s top league (confusingly, there are multiple, competing professional basketball leagues in Mexico), los Pingos Rojos have immediately soared in both the standings and the consciousness of the nylon-addicted populace.
I attended the team’s first ever playoff game in their inaugural season, at a time when the city was preparing for Día de Muertos — a Mardi Gras-esque week of festivities honoring deceased family members and even pets. Despite the hectic chaos of the upcoming holiday, the Diablos attracted a couple thousand fans in the south end of the city for a cathartic overtime win. Juan Toscano-Anderson — the former Golden State Warrior and Los Angeles Laker of AfroMexican descent — was in the house sitting on the baseline, garnering chants and photos from local fans.
A big reason for the early success and fandom of los Diablos Rojos in their debut year? Gael Bonilla — a 21-year-old Mexican big man with massive appeal, who previously earned his stripes in Spain while playing for FC Barcelona’s top baloncesto unit as a teenager — who grew up in nearby Ecatepec. Bonilla, a 6-foot-7 wing, dominated throughout the contest, showcasing his versatility as one of the country’s top prospects. His father, Edgar Bonilla (a large, former hooper who was in attendance with the fans) is a massive advocate for the sport in his hometown.
In a sport where Mexican nationals don’t exactly dominate — most of the marquee players in the LNBP are U.S. citizens or international guns-for-hire — seeing Bonilla excel is undoubtedly a boost for the sport’s national stature.
The Diablos Rojos have plans to nurture the city’s basketball ecosystem with training camps, family programs, and more. As the country’s most dominant and successful sports franchise in the Mexican baseball world, they are uniquely positioned — and funded — to make it happen. In speaking with their General Manager, Nick Lagios (formerly of the South Bay Lakers and Capitanes de Ciudad de México) the organization is primed and eager to take the throne as the city’s pre-eminent hoops operation.
Everything indicates a basketball revolution is at hand. And with the NBA set to arrive this weekend for its yearly NBA Mexico Game, the rest of North America will get to peek at what those down here already know: this sport is thriving abroad.
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