I got no problem with all of that, but I have to admit that it seems a touch hypocritical of the NBA. They are the de facto employer of both NBA players and NBA D-League players, but they have decided on different employment rules for those players. If you want to play in the NBA, you are not allowed to enter the draft until one year after your high school class graduates. So far, what that means is any 18-year-old who thinks he can play in the NBA straight out of high school still has to figure out a way to spend that spare year, usually by being Big Man on Campus. (One kid decided to spend that year in Europe, mainly because he didn't meet academic eligibility requirements, and the early returns on that seem to be pretty positive.) Again, I’m a supporter of higher education, and I could probably be convinced that it’s generally bad for a player’s social development, if not his basketball development, to try to go straight to the big leagues out of high school. However, just to play devil’s advocate – an 18-year-old could apply to work in the NBA front office. An 18-year-old could play in the D-League, to compete against grown men. It just looks bad that the NBA is deciding that every single 18-year-old in the country is eligible for all the responsibilities of NBA adulthood, without being eligible for the top-end paycheck that a 19-year-old can earn.
This has been hashed and re-hashed already – I just had a thought that I haven’t seen out in the world, so I figured I’d try it out. It’s still kinda rough, so here are the highlights:
- We can all pretty much agree that David Stern is a business genius.
- The no-18-year-olds rule came into effect in the NBA in June 2005.
- In exactly the same Collective Bargaining agreement, the minimum age for the D-League was lowered from 20 to 18.
- If you trust Wikipedia, it was in March of 2005 that Stern announced a plan to expand the NBA D-League to fifteen teams and develop it into a true minor league farm system, with each NBA D-League team affiliated with one or more NBA teams.
- In the 2005 ESPN article where I’m getting pretty much all the rest of my info, Mr. Stern was quoted as saying, "This will encourage our scouts to spend time in D-league gyms rather than high school gyms."
I think that last bit is kind of instructive. So far, every article that I’ve come across that deals with the age-restriction rule just assumes that it’s a cynical way for the NBA to assure that high school students play some sort of college ball. However – if you’re David Stern the businessman, and it’s 2005 and you have an eye on the future – wouldn’t you rather envision a day when you have both the best professional men’s basketball league on the planet and the best place for players to develop their skills before they enter that best league? Sure, the NBA has no issue with colleges supplying them players for now – but imagine, 20 years from now, an Iverson-like talent can’t meet the academic standards for U.S. colleges. If the D-League has progressed into a “true minor league farm system”, there’s probably no question of him playing in Europe. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if by that point, the rules have changed again so that when the Clippers win the lottery, they’re allowed to draft a high school kid, as long as they stash him in the D-League for at least a portion of his first season, and then they can call him up when he’s proven himself ready. The D-League gets a transcendent talent, which can only help at the box office. Granted, that’s probably not enough to make viewers abandon their college affiliation in favour of watching the D-League – but what if by that time, the D-League had also fiddled with its playoff format in order to institute a one-and-done bracket? That would have to be at least as exciting to the casual viewer (cough, gambler) as ye olde March Madness. I imagine any businessman would enjoy having a slice of that pie. Or the whole pie, if he could.
Yeah, it’s a conspiracy theory and a long shot – but I’m just sayin’, is all.
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