Making The Jump

Bill Simmons, absorbed in his Celtics universe, complained at length last week about the NBA lottery system, inadvertently reminding me of a point I been meaning to make for some time. One of his central complaints about the draft lottery is that, by allowing the worst-run franchises the best draft picks, dynastic teams can never develop, since franchises with bad records tend to have bad management - they're not capable of turning the high draft picks into a dynasty, and well-run franchises can't stockpile the talent they need to reach dynasty status.

Well, until recently, there actually was a way for a well-run franchise to continue to assemble top talent: draft high schoolers. The uncertainty of a high school player meant that a franchise with good scouting and coaching could find a gem below the top 10 picks in the draft, and eventually have themselves a superstar, without ever needing a top-4 pick. Witness Kobe Bryant, taken 13th in 1996, or Amare Stoudemire, taken 9th in 2002. A high-quality franchise like the Lakers or Suns could still build a dominant team with the right balance of scouting and coaching. Now of course, players cannot jump directly from high school to the NBA.

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I rarely see a well thought-out piece supporting high school players being allowed to jump to the pros. Either writers drone on and on about the evils of this, or someone like Scoop Jackson writes something along the lines of "yo you dun kno what it's like dog, being from nothing guys gots to get they money yo" without ever getting into the basketball itself, so allow me to try a reasoned argument. (As far as the law goes, I'm of the mind that says if you want to work, and an employer wants to employ you, provided that action doesn't impose significant externalities on others, it is unconstitutional to disallow such a transaction. The point is moot now since the league imposed a ban on high school players, so there are technically no employers who want to employ any of these high schoolers. But if you want my legal opinion, there it is. Spencer Haywood was right, Maurice Clarett was right, and those who disagree pretty much just want to make money off someone else's back or see their alma mater win, and I can't state it any more clearly than that.)

I'll start off by conceding the most obvious point - forcing players into college creates a built-in marketing machine for the NBA. It's more exciting to watch rookies you already know about. I completely concede that. The other most common point is that allowing the jump straight to the pros lowered the quality of college basketball. True, but I don't think the effect is as strong as some might have you believe. In this year's NCAA tournament, the only meaningful participants (your team has to have made the Sweet 16) who wouldn't have been there would be Brandan Wright and Greg Oden, who, for most of the tournament, was saddled with foul trouble and not all that fun to watch. TV ratings weren't down over the last 5 years, in fact, the March Madness contract is only getting fatter and fatter. If NCAA games got worse, they sure didn't seem to get less entertaining. If the traditional powers suffered because the elite crop of players was a little smaller, it only made college basketball that much more energized at the suddenly-more-competitive Gonzaga and Creighton and George Mason. Plus, the value of getting to see Kevin Durant play at Texas for a year has to be balanced against what we lost by having his NBA development held back by a year. If Kobe Bryant had gone to college for 3 years, you can bet he wouldn't have been ready by 1999 to be the fourth quarter leader of a championship team. By allowing great players to jump directly, we increase the total window they have to play at their absolute best, against the best competition in the world.

A widely held myth is that kids were destroying their lives, thinking they were NBA-caliber, and passing up on a chance to get an education chasing foolish NBA dreams. This is nothing more than paternalistic insanity. First of all, any reasonable person ought to have serious doubts about the strength of education for most elite Division I basketball players. Secondly, the notion that kids were wasting away on the NBA dream by declaring for the draft is patently false. I figured very few kids had declared and not gotten drafted, and thanks to some research by Michael McCann at the Sports Law Blog, now I know I'm right. Only three men - Taj McDavid, Ellis Richardson, and Tony Key - declared for the draft and have not made a decent living playing professional basketball. None were seriously recruited by D-I schools. Their declarations for the draft were akin to my dad declaring for the NBA draft. Even the notable busts, like Korleone Young, earned almost $300,000 in his one NBA season, and earns close to $100,000 playing abroad 8 months of the year. To believe that he could have earned millions had he gotten college training is to assume far more than can be proven, and I'm not in the business of worrying about the life prospects of guys who will earn $1 million by age 27, as Young likely will.

Of course, there is another point often made about Korleone Young: he was a pretty lousy NBA player. So the story goes, that even though Kobe Bryant is a star, most of the high school players are busts, and these draft busts were ruining the NBA. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, relative to draft position, high school players have been phenomenally successful as pros. Because teams are so selective in choosing someone to make the leap, the hit rate turned out to be tremendous. Since Shawn Kemp went pro in 1989, 9 high schoolers have been all-stars, but only 6 high schoolers have ever been drafted with a top-4 pick. I often hear that there's a few high school superstars, but after that the field is very diluted. Well, after the "few" superstars (Kobe, LeBron, Amare, T-Mac, KG), try these names on for size: Rashard Lewis, Jermaine O'Neal, Al Jefferson, Josh Smith, Monta Ellis, Andrew Bynum, Dwight Howard, JR Smith, Stephen Jackson, Al Harrington, Eddy Curry, Tyson Chandler. Some all-stars, some players who will likely become all-stars, some guys on the list of the 25 best players after the all-stars. Guys I didn't name have still had productive, long-term NBA careers, like DeShawn Stevenson, Darius Miles, DeSagana Diop and Kwame Brown. Contrary to popular belief, there aren't that many other names after what I've just listed.

A lot of these guys had rookie season struggles, but so do a lot of rookies who attended college. Most of these players were already making meaningful contributions by their second year in the league. The one guy who took a long time, Jermaine O'Neal, was likely hindered by playing behind another all-star in Portland, Rasheed Wallace. While rookie struggles are inevitable for young kids, I firmly believe that the overall quality of play is higher by allowing the direct jump, because it increases the number of prime years for elite players, and accelerates development by forcing them to play with tougher competition at an earlier age.

Everyone seems to think the NBA's minimum-age requirement is a smashing success. It may very well be psychologically for these kids - the extra year in college is a nice chance to grow up with a little less weight on the shoulders. But as a basketball fan (and I'm an NCAA fan too), if the phenoms want to, we really ought to let the truly elite players play against their only real competition, other professionals.