Happy 2026! Hope you had a great holiday season. Related to the below: Jalen Brunson is my favorite Jalen. — Dan

Right now, there are roughly 20,000 American men in their late teens or early 20s in the United States named Jalen. We know this because the U.S. Social Security Administration keeps meticulous records of such things, and, according to their data, 20,446 boys born between 2000 and 2009 were given the name Jalen. That makes the name the 190th most popular of that period, sandwiched between Raymond at 189 and Gregory at 191. The decade before, “Jalen” didn’t make the top 200. And the decade before that? There were virtually none, as seen in the graph below (via here.)

The name seems to come out of nowhere — and it kind of did. It was born on the basketball court.

In 1991, the University of Michigan had one of its best ever seasons in men’s college basketball, but not on the court. The team made the NCAA Tournament every year from 1985 through 1990, but the 1991 team failed to reach that point, finishing their year with 14 wins and 15 losses. Off-court, though, they had a coup — the team recruited five of the nation’s top high school basketball prospects. Collectively, Michigan’s 1991-1992 freshman class was known as the “Fab Five,” and they were immediate stars. All five would ultimately start in the NCAA Tournament championship game come April 1992.

Jalen Rose, pictured at the top, was one of the Fab Five. And as you can infer from the graph, when he was born in 1973, “Jalen” wasn’t a common name — if one at all. As it turns out, his mom, Jeanne Rose, came up with the name by creating a portmanteau between Jalen’s father’s name, James, and his uncle’s name, Leonard (or “Len”). With Jalen Rose’s birth came the birth of the name Jalen itself.

Jalen Rose proved to be a basketball star. He led Michigan to the NCAA championship game in both 1992 and 1993, and in 1994, was selected in the first round of the NBA Draft. He had a 13-year NBA career, playing for six different teams. After retiring from the NBA in 2007, he started a career as a broadcaster, working as an analyst for ABC and ESPN until 2023. If you’re a basketball fan, Jalen Rose is a household name. And as a result, you may have a kid named Jalen.

Today, there are dozens of notable Jalens listed on Wikipedia, as seen here. And if you look carefully, you’ll notice that only two (other than Rose himself) were born before 1992, and almost every single one is known for being an athlete. In 2011, ESPN called the phenomenon the “Jalen Generation” — a cohort of young athletes all, almost magically, connected to Jalen Rose.

The magic wasn’t lost on Jeanne Rose, as Jalen discovered shortly after she passed away in February 2021. While going through her belongings, Jalen Rose discovered, per ESPN, that she had a handwritten list of every Jalen in the NBA — she had followed not only her son’s career, but also those who were named in his honor. As Jalen Rose told ESPN, his name became “became something that she realized had become bigger than her — and clearly way larger than me. It's something now that really is gonna be what defines her legacy and mine. Something that has zero to do with the score of any game that I ever played."

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And thanks! — Dan

Today’s Bonus fact: The name Madison has a similar path to popularity. In the 1980s, “Madison” wasn’t one of the top 200 most popular girls names among babies born in the United States. But that changed quickly: Madison was #29 in the 1990s, peaked at #2 in the 2000s and fell slightly to #10 in the 2010s. (It’s still among the top 50 in this decade but falling.) The reason for the sudden popularity? The 1984 movie Splash, starring Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks. Hannah plays a mermaid who washes ashore in New York and, due to her minimal understanding of the English language, decided to give herself the name “Madison” after a Madison Avenue street sign. The movie proved so popular that parents of children born over the next 15 years increasingly named their girls “Madison” as well.

From the Archives: Wendy: The Peter Pan edition of the Jalen Generation.