3 KINGS
“FOR US, at this point, it’s bigger than basketball,” Devin Booker says, with D’Angelo Russell sitting to his right and Karl-Anthony Towns sitting to his left. “We know each other’s families. This is way bigger than the game.”
Three of the NBA’s youngest, brightest stars are friends for real. Not the hi-bye type of stuff. The “What-are-you-doing-after-this-pho-toshoot?” type of energy, like Booker asked Towns after they spent an entire afternoon together at a studio in midtown Manhattan. The all-day, all-night texting kind of friendship. The laugh at and fight about memories flow. The know-each-other-so-well-that-they-can-make-each-other-get-emotional level of camaraderie.
Booker, Towns and Russell are the League’s newest, coolest family. And they know it.
“We gotta do this again, when we’re all on the same team,” Russell jokes toward the end of the day. “Nah, don’t cut it,” he says to our rolling cameras. “Y’all got it on footage. When we’re all on the same team—I ain’t gonna tell you which team because I don’t know—we’re gonna do this again.”
This isn’t the first time that SLAM has linked
