It seems like a long shot, but what happens if his Tik Tok career outstrips his NBA career?
One of the most interesting things about Jared McCain when he got to Duke was his startling success on Tik Tok.
McCain built an audience of around three million and it’s not entirely because he was a prominent high school basketball player.
He really gets the medium and rather than his account depending on basketball for popularity, one tends to support the other.
In the article linked above, Duke coach Jon Scheyer said he was prepared to intervene if the social media side became an issue (by intervene, Scheyer means a “be careful on TikTok” speech).
It never did of course.
Social media is fascinating in a lot of ways but not least of all because users can become significant stars, entirely bypassing what Joni Mitchell once called the star making machinery, in her case behind the popular song, but same principle applied to the rest of the media.
That’s completely gone.
And while some people will never be able to make it work, McCain has a rare situation: he is elite at two different things, and that’s highly unusual.
We have no idea how popular NBA players are on Tik Tok, but there’s a reasonable chance that McCain will be the league’s biggest star on the platform from draft night forward. That’s an insanely cool position to be in but it also speaks to how the Internet has leveled things on the one hand and elevated talented people on the other. It’s going to be fun to watch how he progresses.
