Great characters and writing by Jordan Ritter Conn. A dose of reality about the silent majority of athletes with professional aspirations:

For some of the players on tour, this is how their basketball lives end: not at their college senior day or an NBA retirement ceremony, but on a Wednesday evening in a Berlin suburb, with the teammates who’ve beaten them out for jobs, wearing jerseys that bear the logos of a two-bit agency and a charity they’ll likely never hear of again. Their dreams have been fading slowly. Here, they finally die.