One league instead of two hundred teams
A new pathway for elite high school talent got its launch date on Tuesday. The Futures Basketball League will tip off next spring with 120 of the best under-18 boys players in the United States, split across 12 regional teams.
The money behind it carries famous names. LeBron James and Kevin Durant sit among the founders and early investors, alongside their business partners Maverick Carter and Rich Kleiman. Two former No. 1 overall picks, Derrick Rose (2008) and Orlando’s Paolo Banchero (2022), come in as team owners.
Rosters will draw from the high school classes of 2028 through 2031. Games run on weekends from April to August, across 10 weekends in what organizers call “top U.S. markets,” and the season ends with a national championship weekend.
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Free for 2 weeks.
NIL pay and pro coaching
The pitch is simple. Right now the country’s top young players are scattered across spring and summer circuits, many of them backed by shoe companies. Chairman and co-founder Jason Stein put the count at more than 200 teams in seven leagues for the top 150 prospects.
“It’s not fair they don’t get fair value for their NIL and they don’t get professional coaching structure, so this needs to exist,” Stein said. Players will receive NIL payments plus coaching, development and education support. The league says it has already signed some top prospects and will reveal the first names in the coming weeks.
Banchero sounded fully on board. “Bringing the country’s top young players together to compete, grow and learn from some of the best in the game is incredibly exciting,” the Magic forward said.
Built around the calendar
Scheduling will bend around the high school season, NCAA live periods, the NBPA Top 100 Camp and USA Basketball duties. That detail matters. The grassroots summer is where college coaches do much of their scouting, and the Futures model now puts a single, organized product in that window.
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