Imagine if Greg Oden and Kevin Durant had been added to this year’s NCAA Tournament, in addition to Derrick Rose, Kevin Love, Michael Beasley and all the other super freshmen this year? How fantastic would that have been?
What If He Was Still Around?
Well, if the rumor going around San Antonio is true, getting to see players such as the above in the NCAA Tournament through their sophomore years will eventually become a reality. According to the Raleigh News & Observer:
NCAA president Myles Brand and NBA commissioner David Stern are holding a press conference here on Monday and are expected to announce a change in the NBA’s draft eligibility policy. Brand hinted Thursday the NCAA and NBA had worked out a deal to create a 20-year-old age limit, which would keep the best players in college for a minimum of two years.
Being the social and legal pragmatist that we are, we’ve argued for a long time that players should not legally be prohibited from earning a living if there is a market for their services. In other words, the NBA should not have an age restriction. Examples of otherworldly talents such as KG, Kobe, Lebron and Amare have certainly justified their inclusion into the league at the tender ages of 17 or 18, given what they’ve been able to accomplish over the last decade or so.
But from the standpoint of college basketball fan as well as someone with considerable apprehension over the direction of American basketball in general, we love this move. While it’s true that a handful of players such as Durant, Oden and Beasley will essentially be biding their time basketball-wise until draft day, the personal maturation process they will gain by doing their own laundry, studying for midterms and otherwise earning some responsibility at that age is immeasurable. Additionally, by eliminating the going-pro option until after two years of college, it ensures that players will endeavor to stay eligible, which also encourages personal responsibility and commitment to a coach, teammates and the program (as opposed to only oneself).
It also eases the pain and suffering of coaches who recruit lottery picks, only to worry every offseason whether they’re going to stick around. With a two-year rule, a coach can plan around having superstars for at least those two seasons, and as such, he doesn’t have to try to strike gold (or hope the player is another Carmelo) every recruiting season.
With all of this said, we’re a little skeptical of this report. We thought that the NBA Player’s Association would have to agree to this change, and the current collective bargaining agreement (with the age limit at 19) doesn’t expire until 2011. Furthermore, unless some fundamental shift has been made that we’re unaware of, David Stern hardly acknowledges the college game, so the idea that he would present this new rule as an “NBA/NCAA agreement” with Myles Brand in tow sounds rather dubious to us. Nevertheless, we’ve heard for several years that Stern is adamant about getting a 20 year old limit instituted by the next CBA, so it sounds like we’re on the right track, whether it’s announced tomorrow or later. Stay tuned.
Update: Our skepticism was well-founded. While it may still ultimately be true that Stern will push the two-year minimum rule forward at the next CBA negotiations, the NCAA has nothing to do with that, and no such “deal” was announced. Rather, it had something to do with youth basketball in an attempt to clean up the US youth leagues from the filth spewed by the handlers and shoe companies.