Whatever happened to player nicknames??

[markinca]

Magic Johnson, Larry Legend, Dr. J, Air Jordan, Clyde the Glide, Hakeem the Dream, The Admiral, The Mailman, The Glove, etc etc etc

It seemed like in the 80s/90s all the great players had really cool nicknames that were extremely well-known.

Why don't we do that anymore?

I think the biggest nba stars that actually have somewhat of a cool-ish nickname and are well known these days are Lebron, Giannis, and _maybe_ Jokic.

EDIT: And just as a barometer for what I would consider 'well-known', if the nickname is mentioned in a player's intro paragraph on wikipedia, I would say that most definitely qualifies.

But what about the others?

James Harden ('The Beard'? I mean, is that really a nickname? He literally has a beard. Pretty weak.)

Anthony Davis ('The Brow'? Same thing as Harden... I mean, he has a unibrow. Weak.)

Kawhi Leonard (I guess 'The Claw' is ok, but do most fans actually know that nickname?)

and then you got a ton of players whose most famous nickname is just a shortening of their name, or their initials, like Kevin Durant, Damian Lillard, Chris Paul, Paul George, Karl-Anthony Towns, etc etc.

And then you've got players who as far as I know don't really have any sort of nickname at all, like Steph Curry (and no, I do not consider 'Steph' a nickname), Klay, Kyrie, Blake Griffin, Russ, Embiid, etc etc.

What happened? Why were there so many well-known nicknames back then and hardly any now?