PicoBlog

Rosters are nearly complete (what’s up, Jacksonville?) so there’s no better time to discuss trivial matters like where we stand on the number of Jalens and all of its variants in college basketball.

Last season, for the first time since Jalen Rose left Michigan for the NBA, we experienced a drop in Jalens in college basketball. But you don’t really know if something has peaked until the peak has passed, so we really needed another season to declare to Peak Jalen.

After a net loss of five Jalens last season, we’ve dropped another eight this season. It’s official: we will never again see as many Jalens as we saw during the 2022 season.

But don’t feel sorry for Jalen. For on thing, Jalen will never go extinct. As one of the most stunning sports-inspired name-adoptions in modern times, there are enough Jalens to spawn second-generation Jalens. And there’s still a significant number of kids being named Jalen every year.

What happens next? Well, as Jalen fades into the background as a common but not the most common name in the college game, another name is quickly emerging to take over the top spot. And while there’s no way to prove it, I think that Jalen is also responsible for this one.

First, though, let’s look at the most popular first names of college basketball players whose name was never used prior to the 2010 season.

Jalen 64 Jaden 27 Jayden 23 Jaylen 19 Kobe 18 Aidan 15 Braden 14 Juwan 9 Hayden 8

Figures listed here are the peak number of players in a season since 2010. And we’re using exact matches for the listed name.

We find two subsets of names in this exercise. First, there are the basketball-inspired names. Jalen is the overwhelming king - even more dominant when you include its cousin, Jaylen - but you also have Kobe and the previously undocumented name-boomlet inspired by Jalen Rose’s college teammate, Juwan Howard.

Seriously, congrats to Juwan. It’s no easy feat for a hooper to spawn even a modest boom in one’s name. For instance, it’s 2024 and we still haven’t seen a LeBron on a roster that’s not actually related to the original. And hope is fading: According to the 247 Sports recruiting database, there are no LeBron’s on the horizon in coming three seasons.

The other group of new names on the list can be phonetically described as [J/A/Br/H]-aden. We’re going to focus on Jaden here because it may only be two or three more seasons until Jaden and its variants (Jayden and Jaeden, mainly) surpass Jalen.

Just two seasons ago, there were 63 more Jalens than Jadens. The margin closed to 45 last season, and is down to 29 this year.

Now, the internet will tell you that the rise in the popularity of Jaden is due to Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith giving their first child that name in the summer of 1998. And from our graph, the timing in the beginning of the Jaden surge clearly supports that theory.

But I think there’s more to it. I believe Jaden is actually another derivative of Jalen and there are two pieces of circumstantial evidence to support this.

First, there were a few Jaden’s prior to Jaden Smith’s existence. In 1997, the name Jaden ranked #456 among U.S. baby names per the Social Security Administration. We can see from our graph that not many made it to college basketball rosters, but they were out there.

Second, the first time Jaden appeared in the top 1000 of U.S. baby names was 1994, the year Jalen Rose made his NBA debut. We can never know for sure, but it’s certainly possible that Jaden is never a name at all unless Jalen becomes a popular name a year or two prior.

There’s a little more to it than that and I think I’ve solved the case of how Jaden will eventually become the most popular name in basketball. There were four important factors:

And then boom, 20 years later, the Jaden frenzy is on.

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