Five and a half years ago, Nils Wagner drove from his apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, to the City of Palms Classic for a high school basketball tournament in Fort Myers, Florida — with me riding shotgun.

Wagner spent the ensuing days working like a madman. For more than 16 hours per day, he filmed future college and NBA stars, then edited the highlight clips to rap beats for his popular YouTube channel, Hoopmixtape. I wrote a story about it.

Wagner's channel helped launch the public careers of future NBA stars including John Wall and Kyrie Irving while they were still in their mid-teens. Hoopmixtape also introduced the masses to YouTube legends such as Aquille Carr, who never would have found fame in another era.

Along with a few other DIY mixtape outfits — with names like BallIsLife and YayAreasFinest — the electric combination of high school stars' highlights and YouTube created a miniature cottage industry. It also created an entirely new platform for young hoop dreamers.

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Five years after that overnight drive from Raleigh to Fort Myers, Hoopmixtape has gone from 125,000 subscribers to more than half a million subscribers on YouTube. Total views between Wagner's two channels (there's also a "blog" offshoot for secondary footage) have grown from 120 million to almost 300 million.

Something else has happened, too. Wagner went from finding and videotaping future NBA stars in a gonzo, by-the-bootstraps manner to working for the NBA itself.

In a twist that shows the flattened digital world as well as varied paths to modern success, Wagner now sits in a league office in Secaucus, New Jersey, editing videos of past and current NBA stars. Hoopmixtape still exists, but Wagner's main job is now as a video editor for the NBA.

So embedded have Hoopmixtape videos become in basketball culture — to "get Hoopmixtaped" is now synonymous with getting dunked on — that Wagner's work caught the eye of executives with the NBA itself.

Kyrie Irving, left, and John Wall are NBA stars Hoopmixtape helped make famous as high schoolers. Image: Tony Dejak, ALEx brandon

"Working with Nils is right in line with our digital strategy," Melissa Rosenthal Brenner, the NBA's senior vice president for digital media, told Mashable via email. "When we see creators and artists on social media with a unique viewpoint on our game, we look for ways to collaborate with them."

But Wagner isn't the only creative mind to find work with the league this way.

"There are a variety of creators who are popular within the design community that we work with on various projects," Rosenthal Brenner added. "It’s an inclusive mindset that allows us to deliver the most compelling videos to our fans."

Fittingly, two of the first hit videos Wagner cut for the league featured former NBA stars who heavily influenced the generation of high schoolers Wagner would go onto make famous himself.

This highlight reel of Jason Williams — very much in the Hoopmixtape style of heavy backbeats and quick edits — was uploaded to the NBA's official YouTube channel in November. It's since been watched more than 1.5 million times.

This similar Vince Carter highlight mix was uploaded in February and has since been viewed more than 600,000 times.

Wagner's latest video for the league chronicles the Golden State Warriors' record 73-win season. It was posted on Friday.

Working in a New York office is a world removed from Hoopmixtape's roots, which included sleeping in cars and barging through marathon road trips that would make a trucker tremble.

Wagner never studied film or video in any official way. He was a former high school basketball player stocking shelves at a supermarket in North Carolina in 2008 when Hoopmixtape was invited to be an early member of YouTube's revenue-sharing partner program. That was his big break, and kicked him into overdrive.

“It’s an obsession,” Wagner told me in 2010, when he was traversing the country filming high school stars and pro-am summer leagues. “If I go to a game now and I don’t have a camera it’s, like, pointless for me, because if anything happens I’ll never be able to see it again. I’m just a fiend for it. I love basketball.”

The Hoopmixtape grind was a never-ending national tour. Now, however, Wagner has the NBA's vast library of video footage at his fingertips.

"In the past with Hoopmixtape, I had to introduce new players to an audience," Wagner told Mashable via email. "With the NBA, I present players that are already established, so I have to really do my research to separate my videos from others. For every big project I have done, I consult with hardcore fans of that topic whether it be a team, event, or player."

Rosenthal Brenner said the league started a new system for managing its media assets digitally in 2006. As part of that project, it's still in the process of digitizing more than 650,000 hours of games and other footage that date back to 1946, the year the NBA was founded.

Wagner said having access to that massive — and still growing — vault of footage has been "awesome," but not entirely different from what he did at Hoopmixtape.

The NBA is still digitizing archives that go back to its earliest days. Image: Marty Lederhandler/AP

"My goal has always been to present basketball visually in a way that's the most exciting and gives past players justice," he told Mashable via email.



The shift from a mixtape hustler on the digital frontier to a company man cutting footage at the NBA office isn't a total surprise, though.

"My friend contacted me a couple of months ago, and reminded me I said that I would be doing mixtapes for the NBA almost 10 years ago," Wagner said. "I have always gone with my gut feeling rather than question what would be realistic or not.

"The past several years with Hoopmixtape I felt that I had accomplished everything I wanted to within that niche," he added. "It's been awesome to have experienced the progression of social media and technology -– and how they’ve made everything more efficient and faster."

Who knows? Maybe a player like Wall — who Wagner helped introduce to the world once upon a time — will decide to call it quits and Wagner will edit his NBA retirement mix. Crazier things have happened.