Young stars ushering in a new era in the NBA Slide over, auntie: Young Chinese find tasty meals in senior canteens
LeBron James will turn 40 in December. Stephen Curry is 36. Kevin Durant will turn 36 and Jimmy Butler will turn 35 by the time training camps start in the fall.
They have been stars of the playoffs for years, players who come up biggest at the biggest times.
But not this year. The next wave isn’t waiting its turn anymore. They’re here — a bunch of 20somethings, with one of them set to be the best player on the team that will be crowned the best in the NBA about a month from now.
It’ll be either Boston, Dallas, Indiana or Minnesota as the last team standing when the NBA Finals end next month. The best players on those teams — Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown for the Celtics, Luka Doncic for the Mavericks, Tyrese Haliburton for the Pacers and Anthony Edwards for the Timberwolves — are all in their 20s.
Brown is 27. Tatum is 26. Doncic is 25. Haliburton is 24. Edwards is only 22. James, Curry, Durant and Butler are still considered greats, but some of the NBA’s star torches sure seem like they’ve already been passed down to the next generation.
“They have no fear,” Dallas guard Kyrie Irving said of the young stars. “They don’t see the O.G. superstars as guys that they look up to as much anymore. They want to kill our records. They want to kill us every time they get on the court. That was the first thing I noticed about Luka, that he just had no fear going against the best in the world. He always walks around like he’s the best player in the world. I think that’s the confidence of a champion. That’s where it starts.”
Out of the 21 regular starters used in the playoffs by the four teams left, only six have turned 30: Boston has 37-year-old Al Horford and 33-year-old Jrue Holiday, the Mavericks have the 32-yearold Irving, the Timberwolves have 36-year-old Mike Conley and 31-year-old Rudy Gobert, and the Pacers have 30-yearold Pascal Siakam.
“Thanks for calling me old,” Siakam said to Haliburton on Sunday, after Haliburton tried explaining how the Pacers have a bunch of players who are basically new to this stage and one in Siakam who has a championship from his time in Toronto.
Experience, right now, surely favors Boston.
The Celtics have five players (Brown, Tatum, Horford, Holiday and Derrick White) with more than 200 career points in the conference finals and the NBA Finals; the other three teams still in these playoffs have two such players, combined (Irving and Siakam).
“It feels like it’s been a long time coming, just being back in this position, getting back to the finals or the conference finals,” Irving said. “It’s just a long way back.”
Irving is truly a rarity in this NBA final four: He has a ring, won with Cleveland in 2016. Almost everyone else left in these playoffs does not. Siakam was on the Raptors team in 2019 that won it all,
Dallas’ Markieff Morris was on the Lakers team that won in 2020 and Holiday was on the Bucks’ title team in 2021.
The pressure ramps up now. It’ll ramp up again on June 6 when the NBA Finals start. It shall be seen which of the young stars are ready to take the last — and biggest — step.
“It showed us who we are,” Edwards said after Minnesota ousted Denver in Game 7 on Sunday.
The Celtics were supposed to be here; they were the favorites entering the season and are bigger (-150) favorites now. Dallas was +4500 to win the title at one point this season; the Mavericks are +500 now, according to BetMGM Sportsbook. Minnesota started the year at +6600; the Wolves are now +260. And it seems like nobody saw Indiana coming; the Pacers’ championship line was +25000 entering the season. They’re +3000 now.
“We’re the uninvited guest,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “So here we are.”
He’s right. The youngsters from Indiana – along with the young stars from Boston, Dallas and Minnesota — have crashed the party. In fact, they have taken over the whole party. One of those clubs will be the newly crowned NBA champions, the sixth different one in the last six years, matching the longest run of parity in league history.
The old guard of the NBA isn’t done yet. But the new class sure seems like it’s ready for prime time.
SHANGHAI — Inside a canteen for seniors in downtown Shanghai, a worker brandishing a sponge inched closer to Maggie Xu, 29, as she was finishing her rice and garlic-and-oilsoaked broccoli. Xu ignored her.
“If you come at 12 o’clock, the aunties will give you less food,” Xu said, speaking softly. After 1:30 p.m., they give away soup. They also start to hover — like the auntie with the sponge — hurrying laggards out the door.
Xu is familiar with the rhythms of the Tongxinhui Community Canteen because she eats there every day to save money. She has a good job as an accountant at a foreign firm, but she can’t shake a creeping sense of unease about her future.
“Only when you save money will you feel safe,” she said.
In these tough economic times in China, many young people are jobless, but they aren’t the only anxious ones. A devastating crash in the value of real estate, where most household wealth is tied up, has heightened a feeling among young working professionals like Xu that their situation is precarious, too.
In Shanghai, some people are finding relief at subsidized community centers that once served mostly seniors but are now also drawing younger crowds. The food is affordable and plentiful. The plates on offer, sometimes as cheap as $1.40, are crammed with local specialties like shredded eel with hot oil, steamed pork ribs or red braised pork belly.
Similar to soup kitchens, the canteens are privately run but subsidized by China’s ruling Communist Party and cater to older residents who are too frail to cook or are homebound, offering discounted meals and delivery services.
At the canteen where Xu likes to eat, diners who are 70 or older are given a 15% discount. The canteen is part of a threestory party community center that opened last May.
As neighbors and workers from nearby shops and small offices pack into the canteen for lunch and dinner, collapsible dining tables and plastic chairs are quickly assembled, spilling out into the building entrance to accommodate grumbling bellies.
During the lull between meals, older residents sit in the entrance, chatting and passing the time. A giant sickle-and-hammer ceiling light glows, reminding diners of the landlord.
The canteens date back to a dark time during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, when the Communist Party replaced private restaurants with communal canteens, said Seung-Joon Lee, an associate professor of history at the
National University of Singapore.
Mismanagement of the canteens played a role in the disastrous famine that would come to define the Great Leap Forward.
“Perhaps to some, it may remind them of the tragic events of the Maoist communal canteens,” Lee said.
More recently, community canteens have emerged as part of a broader social welfare initiative to improve food services for a swiftly aging population.
There are 6,000 local groups running community canteens around the country, according to the official Xinhua news service. In Shanghai, where nearly one-fifth of the population is 65 or older, there are more than 305 community canteens. Many of them get tax breaks and low or free rent.
But the canteens have become an important fixture for Shanghai’s younger working population, too. The portions are often so generous that they can be stretched out over several meals, and diners can often be seen packing away dishes they haven’t finished.
The cost-saving impetus stems from a reluctance to spend that has become so common among Chinese people that it is contributing to the country’s economic problems and prompting top officials to talk with a sense of urgency about promoting confidence.
If there is one thing that Deng Chunlong, 31, is missing right now, it’s confidence. Deng’s personal-training business has suffered. Some clients have stopped going to his studio altogether. Others sign up for one-third of the classes they used to, he said.
Deng, who is tall with unruly hair, has been eating cheaper food at the community canteen in Jing’an, a district of Shanghai, to reduce his spending. He recently stopped renting an apartment and sleeps in his Pilates studio.
“I feel that business is not as easy as before,” he said between bites of cauliflower and pork. “It feels like people are not willing to spend as much.”
When Deng discovered the canteen a year ago, it had mostly older customers, he said, but the clientele has since expanded. “There are many young people now,” he said.
In some neighborhoods, the young stand alongside older people, forming lines that sometimes stretch onto the street. The customers find the community canteens listed on restaurant apps and on social media platforms, where people also share tips about which dishes are the tastiest and the cheapest.
“Young people who are not very wealthy for the time being must visit Shanghai community canteens,” one person wrote on Xiaohongshu, an app similar to Instagram. Another person described the canteens as a “happy home for the poor.”