The most significant story that pulses underneath the many taut yarns of Boys Among Men is one of labor. This was a decade in which elite college-age black male athletes—a population that, in terms of value versus compensation, ranks among the most unfairly treated labor pools in modern American society—found a loophole in the Byzantine rules designed to exploit them and worked it until the NBA sewed it closed (no doubt to the delight of the NCAA, which had suddenly lost its lucrative grip on the country’s top amateur talent). It might be odd to think back on Garnett and Bryant—long-in-the-tooth legends who’ve each made hundreds of millions of dollars before turning 40—as youthful labor revolutionaries, but that’s what they were.

Abrams is a fantastic storyteller, and Boys Among Men unfolds with a broadly chronological structure but with a natural sense for the well-timed digression. For instance, the professional success of Amar’e Stoudemire, who prior to entering the league had been the subject of unflattering coverage ranging from investigations of AAU corruption to humiliating dissections of his family background, stands as one of the great rebukes to anti-prep moralism. Abrams wraps Stoudemire’s tale into a sort of sidebar chapter about the man who drafted him: Suns General Manager Jerry Colangelo, an NBA lifer who’d gone to the University of Kansas in the 1950s to play alongside Wilt Chamberlain, only to be disappointed when Chamberlain bucked the convention of his day by leaving school after his junior year to play a season with the Harlem Globetrotters. In just a few pages Abrams gives us a microcosmic swath of the NBA’s youth movement from Chamberlain to the early 2000s, with the figure of Colangelo— who went from objecting to the prep-to-pro movement to cannily drafting future Rookie of the Year Stoudemire—standing as a sort of weather vane of history.