The NBA is the league for people who like to watch sports. Every NBA player gets a huge $9.6 million a year as of the 2022–23 season. This means that NBA players are some of the best paid in the world.

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Since this? With all that extra money, they can buy cool watches. We call people who flex hard “ballers” because they always wear crazy, expensive clothes to games. It’s a watch collector’s dream.

NBA stars like things that are bigger and stand out more most of the time. A lot of people were surprised when Antony Davis, one of the biggest names in the NBA, wore a very small and simple watch last week.

A cool blue “The Brow” wore an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak with a 37mm case to last week’s first round 3 game of the 2023 NBA Playoffs Western Conference Finals against the Denver Nuggets. Yes, it is 37mm.

The Royal Oak comes in a lot of different case sizes. The OG’s case is 39 mm, which isn’t very big these days. The Royal Oak was called the “Jumbo” when it first came out in 1972 because the case was so big (39 mm).

That’s all I have to say about 37mm being pretty small… Just the right size for a guy. Davis isn’t like most guys, though. Davis is a bad guy. He is 2.08 metres tall and has wings that are 2.27 metres wide. So why does he wear a watch that small?

He didn’t need to buy a fancy watch to make his AD happy or anything. Davis spends a lot of money on watches, mostly Audemars Piguet. It was possible to get this small watch.

Davis isn’t the only famous NBA player who likes small watches. Davis is not even the only Laker who does this.

It’s possible that LeBron James has the nicest and most expensive watch collection in the NBA. He has also been seen wearing bigger watches, like this Rolex Oyster Perpetual 36 “Coral Red” (ref. 126000-0007) that he bought in 2020.

The graph is interesting. Watch boxes have been getting bigger for a long time now. At the moment, 42mm seems to be the case size for most men’s watches. Big watch names like Audemars Piguet (with the Royal Oak Offshore and Concept) and Breitling, IWC Schaffhausen, and Panerai have never had more fans.

But people have said for a long time that case sizes will get smaller again. Since the NBA has always been on the cutting edge of style, that might finally catch on for good. Let’s hope.