Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Dr. Karida Brown introduced me to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Karida and I had been working together around Charly Palmer’s art and its move into Web3, and the introduction came out of that trust rather than from a pitch.

Deborah Morales, Kareem's agent, became my principal interlocutor. From November 2022 the work ran through meetings with the team, including Curtis Brown, and through text messages, emails and Zoom calls between Deborah and me.

The brief was broad. Explain Web3 and NFTs to the team. Think through what Kareem's legacy and intellectual property could become in digital form. Design a possible collection of digital collectibles, the community and collector access around it, a new revenue line around the IP, and the launch.

I worked on the translation first: what in a career like Kareem's could become a digital asset or an experience without becoming merchandise. Then the strategy around it: the token mechanics, who the collectors should be and how they would get access, the community, the story and positioning, the launch sequence, and the partners and introductions the project would need.

The question underneath all of it was simple to state and hard to answer: would this add to the legacy, or spend it?

Kareem’s name was valuable long before any token existed. A digital object needed a reason to belong to that history. Its value could not rest on being attached to a famous person or on being made scarce.

So the token mechanics, collector access and story were one strategic question. Supply and access would decide who entered. The story would decide what they believed they were entering. The community would decide what happened after. I weighed each of those choices against the value of the IP, not as a list of technical tasks. The brief included a new revenue line, but revenue alone could not justify the collection.

The collection did not launch. I advised the team against it.

By the time the work was ready, the NFT market had reversed. The timing was wrong. The concept no longer honoured Kareem's legacy well enough, and launching into a falling market risked turning exceptional IP into something ordinary. The economics and the token mechanics no longer held. Collector demand had changed. I was also concerned about execution that would have looked opportunistic. Against the value of the IP, the risk was no longer worth the reward.

So the recommendation was to protect the asset rather than monetize the moment.

A strategist brought in to create a Web3 opportunity is expected to deliver a launch. The useful thing I could do here was the opposite: tell a legend's team, with reasons they could check, that the right move was to wait.

The collection never went out, and nothing of the legacy was spent chasing a falling market.