“Mom, am I white, black or Puerto Rican?” My teenage son asks me as he hands me his laptop open to his SAT test registration page. “I can only pick one.”

Tough question.

I look at the checkbox option and yes, it is true, after one choice, the program advances to the next query. There are several different Hispanic options (there is “Mexican or Mexican American” and there is this one category: “Other Hispanic, Latin or Latin American”), but the College Board allows only one choice. For race or ethnicity, it is either/or. And only one ethnicity per student.

Soon -- very soon -- those either/or choices will be no reflection of the country. The U.S. Census Bureau 2013 estimates say there are about 54 million Hispanics living in the United States, representing about 17 percent of the total population. And the U.S. government’s Office of Management and Budget uses the terms Latino and Hispanic interchangeably, even though not all folks agree that they have the same meaning. (The OMB’s definition is as follows: "'Hispanic or Latino’ refers to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.”)

My teenagers are not at all interested in the categorizations (“OK mom, who cares?”), and the NBA, it seems, has chucked the definitions and instead is paying attention to young fans.

The league was an early adopter of the truth that whether they are Latino, Hispanic or completely mixed like my boys, their audience with Spanish-speaking origins is not at all homogenous. That’s why Saskia Sorrosa, vice president of marketing at the NBA, said the league planted its tongue firmly in its cheek when it launched NBA en Español programming by the phonetic spelling of its Spanish pronunciation: éne-bé-a.

“We have this conversation all the time,” said Sorrosa. “Do Hispanic fans use NBA or Ene-Be-A more? It’s just not one or the other. They live in both worlds.”

For this year’s edition of Noches Latinas -- which concludes Sunday-- the NBA has shifted the event’s name to Noches Ene-Be-A. It’s smart, super-inclusive and shows that the league understands that the U.S. and the global picture is constantly changing. And change is good.

“Our content is a reflection of how Spanish is consumed. It’s not black and white,” said Sorrosa. “You’ll see it a lot in our social media pages. We could put our status updates in Spanish but add in videos in English. We translated the jerseys and we found that the fans didn’t like the team names [like El Fuego or Las Espuelas] but they loved El Heat and Los Spurs.”

And so the league is unfettered by the semantic discussions as to whether Pau Gasol is Hispanic or Latino, whether the two terms are interchangeable and/or what they mean. The Gasol brothers are actually Catalan, but for fans stateside, the important detail is that the two speak Spanish.

“Fans have that language connection and they feel represented by him on the court,” Sorrosa said.

Iñako Díaz-Guerra, who leads basketball coverage for the Spanish sports daily AS, says the distinctions between Latinos and Hispanics are purely stateside debates.

“We consider ourselves Europeans,” said Diaz-Guerra. “Gasol relates more to [Dirk] Nowitzki in the NBA than [Dominican player] Al Horford. When football players come to Spain to play, we don’t say they are Hispanic or Latino, we identify them by their country, Argentine, Colombian. We don’t lump them together.”

The NBA officially lists 50 all-time NBA Latino players, but it doesn’t include U.S.-born Latinos, players like New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony, whose father was Puerto Rican.

“The NBA speaks the language of the customer. Their vision is commercial,” said Leo Lopez, public relations director for Dominican Republic baseball and general manager for the Dominican basketball league’s Leones de Santo Domingo. “And the NBA needs the Spanish-speaking audience around the world because it is so huge.”

Indeed, Spanish is the fourth-most spoken language in the world (417 million strong), after Chinese, Hindi and English. And it is the second-most spoken language in the United States. Hispanics make up 18 percent of the NBA fan base, outpacing the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population by 38 percent since 2008, according to league figures.

“The growth within the Hispanic fan base has been higher than the non-Hispanic fan base,” Sorrosa said. “The Hispanic population in the U.S. is supposed to triple by 2050, and we hope that is also reflective on the growth of our business and our connection with the fans."

Gabrielle Paese is a deputy editor at ESPN.com.