The Brooklyn Nets / FAAMG

Harper Rose
3 min readFeb 9, 2021

Before I start, I’ll identify the subjects of my article and it’s comparison to readers who may be here for one or the other. The Brooklyn Nets are an NBA team favored by Las Vegas to win the Eastern Conference title, and favored second behind the Lakers to win it all this season. FAAMG is an acronym, essential shorthand to refer to the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft & Google — updated from Jim Cramer’s original ‘FANG’ coinage in 2013.

If you watch the NBA, you saw James Harden not-so-subtly make his way from Houston to Brooklyn to start the new year. This was a significant trade by many metrics, and spoke to macro NBA trends. Besides leaving a team he’d played with since 2012, the team he’d grown and monetized a beard with and doubled his points-per-game with — Harden was also creating the most top heavy ‘super-team’ in the NBA, certainly this year, arguably ever. Brooklyn’s trio of ball-dominant scorers are on pace to break records both offensively and defensively — best and worst respectively, just as you’d expect. They are scoring more points than anyone ever has, while allowing more points than anyone ever has — ever! Simultaneously! The performance of the two and half billion dollar franchise rests in six very talented hands. It is in this regard that the Nets find something in common with our group of American tech behemoths.

If you watch the American stock market, you’ve seen a select group of what one could at least call innovative companies steadily increase in size & stock price at a rate far beyond that of their peers — vertically integrating and absorbing smaller competitors & intellectual property along the way. As of this writing, FAAMG currently represent about %22 of the stock market’s essential and most widely mirrored index, known as the S&P 500 (ticker symbol SPY) — an index meant to represent the 500 biggest & best publicly traded American companies. SPY similarly features little defense to its performance should these companies falter, or say, have a few off-nights.

Like other top-heavy NBA teams in the modern era, from Lebron & the Miami Heat, to Kevin Durant & the Dubs, FAAMG’s outsized influence has worried analysts and critics for years. Many accused Lebron and the NBA infrastructure writ-large of anti-competitive behavior. When KD went to the warriors it was narrated as an admission of defeat; the only way he could make it out of the west was to join the heavy favorite and become the heaviest favorite. Despite persistent derisive attitudes toward these juggernauts, embracers of the top-heavy philosophy have had a nice go if it in the last decade. Lebron and KD secured 2 titles each on their preferred championship-vehicle teams, and Lebron got his third last year after successfully bringing Anthony Davis to Los Angeles. Similarly, despite fears of the financial markets’ increasing reliance on indexing, and index performances increasing reliance on FAAMG, the S&P 500 Essentially tripled between 2010–2020. If your portfolio was comprised solely of the FAAMG stocks, and I’ll spare us both the math here, your return would have been SIGNIFICANTLY higher.

Sadly, we can probably expect similar attitudes in 2021. Surely the reliance by many, on the few, can only lead to disaster. Surely a basketball team paying 110+ million dollars to 3 of its players, all specializing in dazzling isolation basketball, can only lead to disaster. Surely an index whose future is tied to a few trillion-dollar companies likely facing renewed antitrust scrutiny under a Democratic administration can only lead to disaster. But also, maybe not. Maybe Apple uses some of the 100 billion dollars in revenue it collected in just the 4th quarter of 2020 to expand into new businesses, and insulate their existing ones. Maybe Google uses their AdSense money tree to build Minority Report style law enforcement technology (the jetpacks, not the psychic triplets). Maybe The Brooklyn Nets need defense like the S&P 500 needs 496 other companies — it doesn’t hurt, but outscoring the other team sure seems simpler. I’ll take Brooklyn’s Big 3 this year at +300.

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