What Do We Do About Jaden Ivey?

Ivey after suffering the career-altering injury on January 1, 2025

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Today, it’s easy to pinpoint that as the last uncomplicated day of Ivey’s basketball life. He missed the rest of the 2024–25 season, then suffered a knee injury as he was gearing up for his return during the preseason. His injuries kept him out of the game for nearly a year, and, understandably, he’s never looked the same on the court. In the two months before breaking his leg, he scored 20 points in a game seven times, including the one in which he was injured. In 37 games played since, he’s dropped 20 points exactly zero times.

“I’m not the J.I. I used to be,” Ivey acknowledged earlier this year. “But the old J.I. is dead. I’m alive in Christ no matter what the basketball setting is.” It was a surprising, and telling, admission from an active NBA player, particularly one as young as he is. Athletes will stretch the bounds of the English language, performing stunning mental gymnastics along the way, to do anything but admit that they ain’t got it anymore. His blunt admission raised eyebrows, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. He gave the quote on February 19. By April, he was on a street corner in Alabama, preaching about the pure of heart being blessed, as onlookers openly wondered if the man shouting was, indeed, Jaden Ivey.

Gifted athlete falls on hard times, seeks comfort in the divine, and is soon yelling at pedestrians to repent their sins sounds like a plot out of Eastbound & Down. And indeed, some other NBA players have been openly joking about the saga. In a video from the Knicks locker room, players can be heard making quips about their teammates not being “righteous,” and according to the New York Post writer Stefan Bondy, calling each other “fornicators.” While one former teammate expressed concern, saying he hopes Ivey “gets the help he needs,” it’s clear that others around the league are finding humor in Ivey’s fragile mental state.

That said, we don’t know what Ivey is or is not going through, and his words have consequences. In one video, Ivey says that his wife has stopped talking to him (she quickly disputed this). As Kanye West attempts to revive his music career (with mixed results), it’s all the more difficult to predict where Ivey’s life and career goes from here. Not that long ago, Ye was arguably the greatest musical artist of his generation. At his sold-out shows in Los Angeles last week, hordes of kids, many of them white, were moshing together. A good number of them were probably not even born yet when The College Dropout came out in 2004.