As the new NBA season tips off, a different kind of scoreboard is being tallied: the collections. Artsy has rounded up five basketball stars who have grown into serious art collectors, a snapshot of a player-to-patron pipeline that galleries and auction houses are now actively courting.

Heading the list is Carmelo Anthony, the Hall of Fame forward who entered the league at 19 in 2003, won three Olympic golds and retired in 2023 as the NBA's tenth all-time scorer. Early on, teammate Juwan Howard helped steer him beyond what Anthony once thought of as art, and the Syracuse star's taste now runs toward street art, photography and work engaging the Black experience. He owns five works by Nelson Makamo plus pieces by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Ernie Barnes and Marcus Jansen, a trove that has outgrown even his capacious Westchester home.

Kevin Love represents the next stage of the trend: not just buying but operating inside the market. The former All-Star, now with the Miami Heat, assembled a holding spanning photography, sculpture and canvas, including a Rashid Johnson, Ed Ruscha's text painting Me and an Antony Gormley sculpture, and recently guest-curated one of Sotheby's Contemporary Curated sales in New York.

The profile argues the athletes amount to a new collector base that is 'growing fast', in the words of art adviser Gardy St. Fleur, who works with several players. Their fame converts into taste-making power, particularly for artists of colour, and the institutions are responding: Love's Sotheby's turn featured works by Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly and Ernie Barnes, whose Sugar Shack fetched $15.3 million at Christie's last year.