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The NCAA’s devotion to amateurism isn’t the NBA’s fault, but t
The NCAA, staggering through a crisis of its own creation, announced reforms last week that doubled down on the lie of amateurism while offering modest concessions to elite basketball players who walk through its ranks.
The most important concessions allow certain elite prospects to acquire agents in high school to help them determine whether to even go to college, with the NBA and USA Basketball determining who exactly is elite. This particular clause doesn’t go into effect until the NBA rescinds its age minimum.
he NBA’s attitude towards one-and-done has made a bad situation worse.
The NBA and USA Basketball found out about these reforms — reforms they will, in part, be responsible for implementing — when the rest of the world did. As such, both organizations reacted with some immediate bewilderment and a lack of enthusiasm.
That’s par for the course for the NCAA, an entity self-centered in every sense of the world. It didn’t take long for smart analysts to uncover the real purpose of the NCAA’s reforms: pass blame to others while strengthening its investigatory powers, emboldening its enforcement arm’s mission to, uh, crack down on young athletes getting paid for their work through extra-legal means because the normal money-for-work exchange has been prohibited.
But this isn’t just about the NCAA stomping over everything. The NBA’s age minimum policy has long been a tangled web where decisions by one organization — typically the NBA — has massive impacts on everyone else.
Consider 2005, when the NBA bargained the age minimum into its labor deal with the players’ union. Some elite basketball players had been going straight to the pros out of high school for a decade, with an ever-increasing share skipping college. In one fell swoop, and without much time for preparation or cooperation, the NBA’s decisions (with the union’s buy-off) changed college basketball in incredible ways.
The NBA and union inked a deal creating the age minimum in June of 2005. It took effect for the June 2006 NBA Draft. Rising high school seniors who had been planning to jump straight to the pros now had to change course and head for at least one year of college (or join the D-League or go overseas). College programs who may have been focusing on second-tier prospects under the assumption the best players would enter the draft had to shift focus and try to scoop up the best, lest their rivals nab them. All of this happened on the fly.
Over the course of the next couple of years, college basketball adapted to the new reality, with new powerhouses emerging and old ones dying. Those who took advantage of one-and-done profited handsomely; those who didn’t saw success stall out. Meanwhile, the players who would have jumped straight to the NBA were forced into a year’s worth of unpaid apprenticeship.
David Stern, the NBA commissioner who gave us the age minimum, always pushed to expand the rule by a year, preventing college freshmen from entering the draft. The players’ union realized what a travesty the age minimum had become and argued it should be abolished. The two groups most impacted by the rule — high school elites ineligible for union membership, and the NCAA — had no say as the two sides bickered.
The league and union, who were together responsible for the rule’s creation, didn’t resolve the issue in 2011, when a labor battle led to a 5-month lockout. The sides said they’d address it in the months after the lockout ended, but the union was in shambles, with lawsuits flying and a new leader sought.
The NBA and players had another opportunity to fix the issue in 2016 and 2017 while negotiating a new labor deal, this time without acrimony or other big-ticket reforms on the table. Instead, they punted it again.
Stern’s replacement Adam Silver, who has long advocated for a 2-year minimum, recently changed his mind and has said the NBA will rescind the age minimum, given the maneolent impact it had on college basketball and the impossibility of convincing the union to expand it to two years. But Silver said it will be 2021 or 2022 before the age minimum goes away. That’d give the league time to bargain a solution with the union, who must sign off on any rule change that appears in the collective bargaining agreement.
Remember, the NBA shoved this rule change down everyone’s throat in one year. Now it’s going to take its sweet time — up to four years — to fix the problem?
The NCAA acted with petulance and impatience last week by blindsiding the NBA and USA Basketball with new, future responsibilities they didn’t want. But that’s just par for the course on this issue, and frankly doesn’t compare to the bigfooting the NBA has done in the past. The NBA straight-up broke top-flight college basketball for several years with its age minimum, and has done little to help repair the damage.
For a start, the league could take a more aggressive timeline to rescinding the age minimum. Allow prep elites into the 2020 NBA Draft at the latest, but opening up the 2019 NBA Draft to them isn’t an absurd idea, either. Destroy that which created this problem in the first place.
Letting high school graduates back into the NBA without an NCAA pit stop is the eventual solution. Technocrat NBA executives want to create a new complicated system around the preps, and that’s fine. That can come.
But for now, undo the damage and then work with the players’ union to make the system more perfect.
Prep players jumping to the NBA weren’t breaking anything in 2004 and 2005, and they wouldn’t break anything in 2019 and 2020. But the one-and-done system is hurting college basketball. Perhaps it’s finally time for the NBA to care about that.
Yes, the NCAA’s foolhardy devotion to the amateurism lie is the root source of its biggest basketball problems. That doesn’t excuse the NBA for its role in helping bleed college basketball over the past 12 years.
It’s time the league acknowledge the age minimum was a destructive mistake, and to end the experiment immediately.
