“Pick a decade and I got names you’ve never heard of,” writes Hanif Abdurraqib in There’s Always This Year. “Guys who hooped because they wanted to be respected on the streets they loved.” Abdurraqib’s 2024 book is about growing up in Ohio at the same time as LeBron James, witnessing the ascension of a legend. Abdurraqib reminds us that for every superstar like LeBron, though, there are names and names that only resonate in some boroughs, or on some blocks. And that the spirit of a sport like basketball—the way it can take over the emotional climate of a city and pull non-believers into its orbit—depends on all those names, the internationally renowned and the locally cherished. 

In our Winter Issue cover story, sports writer Oren Weisfeld picks several decades, and highlights names that you might know and some you probably don’t. He tells ...