How Far Has Zion Williamson Penetrated The Public Imagination?

How much has Zion Williamson caught the sporting world’s imagination?

Aside from the obvious football references - a sport he’s arguably more perfectly built for - he’s moved on to baseball where Blue Jay Marcus Stroman compares his rookie teammate Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to the likely #1 NBA Draft pick: “It’s like having Zion Williamson on your team; it’s like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of talent. So just to have the opportunity to play with him, it’s amazing.”

What’s significant about this is that it kind of indicates how far people can go with marketing Williamson. In the basketball world, people knew about Michael Jordan and LeBron James and realized they were huge talents (with the possible exception of the Portland Trailblazer’s executives when he was drafted third in 1984) but it took a little while for them to saturate the market mindset.

Zion enters the NBA having already done it. Jayson Tatum recently said that he planned to save and invest his NBA income and live off of his endorsements. In Williamson's case he might be wise to reverse that.