Victor Oladipo ran drills this morning in Las Vegas for scouts who may or may not have bothered to show. Two-time All-Star. Most Improved Player. All-Defensive First Team. No. 2 overall pick in 2013. And I cannot believe the NBA gets to keep calling itself the player empowerment league while this is the reality for one of its guys.

Three surgeries. A ruptured quadriceps tendon in January 2019. A second surgery to repair the same quad tendon in 2021. Then a torn left patellar tendon in the first round of the 2023 playoffs that ended his season, then his year, then his NBA career as anyone knew it. His last NBA game was April 22, 2023. He was technically under contract the following season. He never played. The league moved on the way the league always moves on: to the next body, the next contract, the next marketing campaign.

What Oladipo did instead is worth sitting with. He didn’t retire quietly. He went to China and played preseason games. Then he spent most of this past season with the Wisconsin Herd, Milwaukee’s G League affiliate, putting up 14 points, 4.4 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.7 steals per game in 26 games. Thirty-four years old, logging nearly 29 minutes a night at G League scale, trying to prove he was still a basketball player to an industry that had already filled out its paperwork on him.

https://x.com/VicOladipo/status/2076000892969439426

This morning, he held an open workout in Las Vegas. Phil Handy, a Mavericks assistant coach and one of the most respected player development minds in the game, ran the session. The invitation went out to front office executives, scouts, coaches, and league personnel. Open invite. Come watch a former All-Star work.

Read what Oladipo wrote in his announcement: “open to NBA front office executives, scouts, coaches, league personnel, and officials interested in attending.” That last phrase is the tell. Because no team invited Oladipo for a private workout. No organization picked up the phone. A two-time All-Star with career-long defensive credentials had to organize his own audition, in a convention city, on open enrollment terms, and hope enough decision-makers found the time.

The NBA spent the last decade building a brand around player empowerment. The phrase is everywhere: in Adam Silver’s press availabilities, in the marketing copy, in the think pieces about how this league is different because the players have agency. And that’s true, to a point. Stars can force trades. Superstars can pick their markets. LeBron has built a media company. The empowerment is real, for the players currently generating revenue and eyeballs and jersey sales. Check out NBA coverage at Swipe Sports and you’ll find no shortage of coverage about what the empowered class is up to this offseason.

But “player empowerment” has never really been tested on the players who don’t have that leverage, the ones whose value was tied to their bodies, and whose bodies broke. Oladipo’s case is the stress test the league’s brand can’t pass honestly.

The counterargument writes itself, and it’s not stupid: he’s 34 years old with three major knee surgeries, the last one catastrophic, and teams have a rational interest in not allocating a roster spot and guaranteed money to someone whose durability is genuinely unknown. That’s a real consideration. Front offices aren’t charities. The G League numbers are encouraging, but 26 games at that level does not erase the medical history. A reasonable person can look at Oladipo’s situation and decide the risk calculus doesn’t work.

Fine. But then the league needs to stop pretending the phrase “player empowerment” applies to the players who can’t generate leverage anymore. Because what it actually means, what it has always meant — is that stars can wield power, and everyone else is still at the mercy of the market. The guy who danced through a ruptured quad recovery, who documented every painful step on social media, who became a symbol of resilience the league was happy to amplify when it made for good content — that guy is now renting his own gym time in Las Vegas and sending out an open invite.

That is what the NBA’s player empowerment era looks like when the revenue stops. Oladipo did everything right. He rehabbed. He kept playing. He produced. And now he’s waiting to see if the NBA considers him worth a phone call.

Nobody has to sign him. But someone should at least have the decency to stop running the ads.