The last time a player other than LeBron James or Stephen Curry topped the NBA’s official jersey sales list was 2012-13, when Carmelo Anthony held the spot for the New York Knicks. That 11-year streak ended in 2024-25, and an American didn’t break it. Luka Doncic became the first international player in league history to lead the NBA’s jersey sales list. And that is simply part of why Kevin Durant is arguing that Doncic’s game now carries American basketball’s fingerprints wherever it travels, and vice versa.
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Durant made his case on Boardroom Talks, sitting down with Speedy Morman after Morman asked whether younger players will start looking up to global stars like the Los Angeles Lakers’ Doncic instead of the Americans who built the league.
“Because he’s that great. They should get it from him,” Durant said. “I love when guys want to be like Luka or Michael Jordan or try to emulate them. When you go work out and get as close as you can to that level, you’re going to be a good player.”
“Why not?” He added: “I love to see Luka, from a different country, crossing people up like we do. He’s bringing that back to where he’s from. That’s a little piece of us there, too, the American culture of basketball.”
The numbers support what Durant is describing. NBAStore.com jersey sales were up 21% in the period following his trade to the Lakers, compared with the same period a year earlier. And he stayed at or near the top of the league’s sales list the following season, finishing second only to Curry for 2025-26.
The trade rose national NBA viewership by 16%, while average purchase prices for Lakers home games rose 19%, according to TickPick. The Mavericks’ average ticket price, by contrast, fell 40% once he left, and the team ended up offering fans refunds amid the backlash.
A Betsson study of the 2020-2025 period ranked Doncic the second-most influential European player behind only Giannis, while giving him the single highest fan-sentiment score of anyone measured, at 62%.
Jordan is the obvious historical comparison for that kind of pull on a single market. He led the NBA in merchandise sales every season from 1989-90 through the end of his career, accounting for roughly a quarter of all league jersey sales during the 1990s. Fortune estimated that he was responsible for $3.1 billion in increased sales of NBA-licensed products.
Fortune’s often-cited 1998 estimate put Jordan’s broader economic footprint, TV rights fees, gate receipts, merchandise, and endorsements combined, at roughly $10 billion, a number that became shorthand for “the Jordan Effect”. League-wide NBA revenue grew from $165 million in his rookie season to $2.75 billion by his final retirement.
Simply put, Doncic’s rise isn’t separate from American basketball culture, but an extension of it. And Doncic himself has been enamored by it for a long time. Long before he ever set foot on an NBA hardwood, his basketball education happened miles away at Real Madrid’s academy. Yet, the player he idolized most growing up wasn’t European at all. It was Kobe Bryant.
As for the Jordan parallel, Doncic would be happy to hear it. LeBron James has earlier said that he tried to make Doncic the debut athlete of his own “Team LeBron” line at Nike, only for Doncic to instead sign with Michael Jordan’s own imprint in December 2019, becoming the first European-born player to do so.
In December 2025, ahead of the launch of his Luka 5 signature shoe, he told Forbes his own game was shaped by watching Jordan long before he ever played in the NBA. “I grew up idolizing MJ,” he said. “I idolized the way he played, his competitiveness.”
That said, the two eras used different media and different scales of money, but they’re tracking the same thing: one player moving jersey sales, TV numbers, and ticket prices for an entire league. It’s all about the kind of measurable commercial pull that only a handful of players in NBA history have ever produced.
