Let’s be conservative and say that Fred VanVleet is one of the 60 most impactful players in the NBA. Before the pandemic, the league was making about $10 billion in revenue. By any measure, that makes VanVleet a pretty notable player.

And, OK, maybe you’ll note he spent four years at Wichita State, not exactly Duke or Kansas, and has spent his entire six-year NBA career in Toronto, not necessarily the most well-lit path to basketball fame. You would have to concede that even given that journey, he has had memorable turns in the Final Four and the NBA Finals. He is, as of this moment, likely the best player on the Raptors. That would make him, you could say, a household name.

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Except VanVleet is not a household name. The league’s fans, coaches and even some broadcasters get the point guard’s name wrong with regularity. There are no confusing J/Y sounds like you get with players from the Balkans, no multiple-syllable loop-the-loop roller coasters like there are in Antetokounmpo. His name isn’t as simple as, say, Kyle Lowry, but saying Fred VanVleet should be pretty rudimentary. His name is pronounced precisely as it is spelled.

Instead, VanVleet, the man, has gone cold. He has accepted that to some, he will always be Fred VanFleet.

“I’ve got it my whole life. VanFleet is just easier,” the Raptors point guard said last Monday in Portland. “I don’t know. … I’ve been numb to it for a long time. I don’t even care anymore.”

Obviously, the error predates the arrival of rock revivalists, Greta Van Fleet, although they cannot help. The world’s lack of attentiveness has made VanVleet a linguistic nihilist. As a basketball community, we can do better. Both of his head coaches in the NBA, Dwane Casey and Nick Nurse, have been among the offenders.

“I think it was in his rookie season. I think I always thought it was VanFleet (before he joined the Raptors),” Nurse said in Sacramento. “I had heard it so much on TV as VanFleet. I don’t think I knew it until I saw it on the back of his jersey. It was like, ‘I didn’t even know it was a V.’

“I don’t try to say the V very hard; I will say that much. Freddy VanFleet.”

A few days later, I cornered Raptors TV play-by-play man Matt Devlin, who was having dinner with his analyst for Sportsnet, Alvin Williams, before the Raptors played the Warriors in San Francisco. Devlin said it’s a name he had to consciously pronounce correctly at first, although it has obviously become habitual over six years.

Still, Devlin is fairly certain it comes across as “VanFleet” when he says it too quickly, and he was cursing me for bringing up the name so shortly before a broadcast.

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“The fact that you brought all this up, without question every time I say, ‘VanVleet’ tonight, I’m gonna think not only of Fred, but I’m gonna think of you, too — and Alvin, because now Alvin’s worried about it,” Devlin said.

Williams, a seat over, grimaced.

“I’ve been worrying about it,” said Williams, who just started the job this year. “I’m still saying VanFleet.”

“There are no limits on where people are in life where people mispronounce it,” VanVleet said. “The smartest people I know, the most successful people I know, to people on the street, they all butcher it. I don’t know. It’s one of the world’s mysteries I guess.”

VanVleet uses his mother’s last name. His father, Fred Manning, was killed in 1999. His stepfather is Joe Danforth. On a recent episode of the “ALL THE SMOKE” podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, VanVleet said he was told the last name is Dutch. (Barnes introduced him as “VanFleet,” or at least a sped-up version of “VanVleet” that sounded close enough.)

Most infuriatingly for VanVleet, it has gone beyond pronunciation.

“People don’t read. I’ve got a big name on the back of my jersey,” VanVleet said. “The worst is on the internet. People will write me at my handle, which spells my name the right way, and still put the F in it.

“If you could pronounce it, great. Don’t be disrespectful. But the internet one is the one where it’s like, ‘OK, now it’s just ignorance.’ But I feel like most people are pretty stupid, so it doesn’t bother me as much.”

Well, that is one path to serenity.

The question, of course, is why? VanVleet hasn’t spent too much time thinking about it, but he has developed at least one theory.

“I don’t know if it’s because it’s not such a common name or my first name starts with F or whatever,” VanVleet posited.

Well, in the spirit of the noblest investigative journalism, I went searching for an answer. Rosemary Martino is a professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Speech-Language Pathology. Her husband is a big basketball fan, and she said she was going to test him on the pronunciation of VanVleet later in the day. (He aced it.)

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She gave my theory that “fleet” can be a descriptor in basketball, and so it gets unintentionally assigned to the point guard, almost no credence.

“I don’t think the semantics, like the meaning of the word, is coming in here,” Martino said. “That’s not my thinking. I think all hypotheses in this are valid, so I wouldn’t necessarily (outright) dispute it.

“I must admit, I was probably getting (his name) wrong as well.”

So, what is it? Martino saved me the breakdown of all the muscles in the mouth, but her hypothesis mixes science with Occam’s razor.

“In the English language we have several sounds, and some sounds are what we call pairs where we use the same muscles in the mouth to produce them, but they differ in how we engage other muscles,” Martino said. “For example, you have sounds like S and Z, which are similar sounds. But we engage muscles of the voice box to produce the “zzz” sound but not the “sss” sound. We have similar sounds like that like “puhhh” and “buhhhh.” F and V are that (type of) pair. They are paired sounds. F and V are commonly intermixed, replaced with one another. That’s one of the reasons why F replaces the V in his last name.

“The reason why it’s replaced at all is it’s uncommon. It’s not very common in the English language to have the combination of V and L. It’s common to have other combinations, S, L for example. And F, L is a common combination for many words, but V, L is not. So, it’s not something that an English-speaking person is going to be familiar with. If they’re hearing something they’re not familiar with, but it’s very similar to another sound, V being very similar to the F sound, they probably automatically assume that they’re hearing ‘Fleet’ versus ‘Vleet.’ And they just replaced it, because that’s what is common to the English speaker. People aren’t even aware that they’re making that kind of replacement. They just think it’s the correct sound.”

Martino emphasized that there would be no maliciousness with the consistent mispronunciations. Our brains are just taking shortcuts to try to save us time and energy.

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In the process, they are messing things up. And that even stands for writing his name.

“Why are they writing it wrong? I think because they don’t recognize that it’s wrong,” Martino said. “That’s maybe naive of me. I may be naive. But I don’t imagine that anyone is doing this intentionally. I think they really think that’s how you spell it. I really honestly think that. It’s just beyond them to recognize, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a V. It’s not an F. It’s a V.’ I really think it’s totally accidental.

“Poor guy. Honestly.”

Again, though, Martino is not ready to rule out anything. I brought up VanVleet noting that his first name could be playing a part.

“There is contextual cueing. With the F being his first name, it’s already in his auditory space,” Martino said. “You’re hearing it and then you’re saying it. So you’re more likely to carry it over into his last name and just use the F rather than the V. It probably does have an influence, for sure. It’s more likely to trigger that sound replacement.”

A day after my conversation with Martino, I passed on that information to the Raptors’ point guard.

“So,” VanVleet responded, “I can be a professor, then?”

(Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)