OT - Mark Cuban thinks NBA should have 3 year rule
Given all the melt down about the Burke (as of yet, no decision), I thought this article was appropriate. Interesting view from the other side.
No one in any profession can say, or have others (references, i.e. scouts) say, that he is good enough to work at a particular company, and force the employer to hire him or her on that qualification. The NBA is an employer. There is no legitimate difference. And minority is completely irelevant and a red herring.
IBM can't have a policy of not hiring anyone over 55, for example...well, not without being sued successfully.
to hire Anthony Davis, and the comparison to other employers doesn't work. If I want to work at an investment bank, and can't get a job because I don't have an MBA, that is the result of a bunch of individual employers making individual decisions not to hire me because they think having an MBA is an important aspect of the job.
Here, there is not a single person who disputes that NBA teams want to employ Anthony Davis, and would have wanted to employ him had he been eligible for the draft after high school. The NBA has set up rules to prevent teams from drafting players they would otherwise want to hire. It's a rule set up across the league to prevent indiviual teams from selecting kids they think are good enough to play in the league. The analogy doesn't work.
The NBA is an employer, that is what they do. They are an employer with 30 branches that have compeptitive owners that want to beat each other. Like GE with 30 divisions. David Stern is the CEO. If he and a majority of his owners agree that 3 years is necessary then they think it's best for their businesses to have that rule--it is exactly the same as your MBA example. An employer once believed that some HS students could go directly to their company and succeed--now they believe that the success rate of HS players is too low and first went to 1 year, now want three years of college. It is the same.
If they are good enough to leave early and play in the NBA, then they'll get that money eventually. While they are in college, they get all their necessities paid for through their athletic scholarships. It's not like they're struggling to eat while they're still in school.
Or they could blow out their knee, not be able to play ball again, and have earned nothing for those 2-3 years. Sure they get their degree but who are YOU to decide that that's a fair tradeoff?
I think this is how baseball does it, but I'm not positive, but my feeling:
Let players who want to go pro straight out of high school go pro. If you don't want to go straight to the NBA, then 3 years of college (or Euro-league or whatever else) until you are able to enter the draft. That seems to make pretty good sense for almost all parties, the NBA teams, the NBA vets, gets kids that want an education most of an education at least, kids that aren't superstars now will at least get an education to fall back on, kids that just want to play can go Euro, and those that have no desire for one don't have to bluff through a year of it.
the NBA wants to make every high school kid go to college to save NBA GMs from themselves. GMs weren't very good at differentiating between Kwame Brown and Dwight Howard, and want a rule that gets them more information so they don't end up drafting the next Kwame Brown.
They would like to get as much film and legit evaluation time on kids as possible, or at least enough to get a firm read on (which I would assume 3 years would do, you could get a pretty good trend at that point). The players probably wouldn't support it though (as a good hand full of them remember not wanting to be in college anymore). I think that's why you have to give them an out, or essentially you can go straight pro or you can commit to something else for 3 years. It gives assumption that they actually have an option.
Every owner in the NBA should be in favor of a 3 year rule. It gives them more time to evaluate prospects, and would cause fewer busts that they're stuck paying guaranteed contracts to.
Pretty much a no brainer, in my opinion.
When things are played on an even playing field nothing changes. Therefore the same amount of money would be wasted.
They might just draft fewer busts, and more of the NBA's total revenue would go to established veterans rather than speculative bets on 19 year olds.
Not that that's a good idea in and of itself, but in terms of the number of dollars going towards unproductive players, it could help.
As was posted here a week ago or so (by Brian?), David Stern said that he offered the NCAA some sort of deal in which elite MBB prospects would either be insured or paid by the NBA if/when they stayed in college. That would encourage players to stay in school without taking away their freedom to go pro when they wanted to. I love the idea of more guys staying in school, but I don't like the idea of just telling them that they can't do it.
The Players Association would sue the NBA and I'm not sure if it is a hassle that they want to deal with. If it was going to happen last year was the time when everyone was sitting at the table together.
Who is stopping them from having the NHL/NCAA rule? Everyone is draft-eligible when they are 18, and the team retains the rights for four years? If a player wants to go to the team that drafted him, he will know he has a solid chance of getting to the NBA (instead of the uncertainty that comes from the draft). The teams get as many as 4 years to watch a player develop for free, without taking up a roster spot or any team money/energy.
Is it an NCAA or NBA rule that is preventing this from happening?
Draft rules are all handled by the NHL, NFL, MLB and NBA, and you also need to add all four of those PA's on the list as well.
I agree they should go to the NHL or MLB model; either would work fine and get rid of a lot of one-and-done types that aren't gaining anything or helping the college game by being around.
I believe that where college eligibility is concerned, the NCAA handles that, not the NBA.
I'm sure the NBA isn't opposed to drafting kids and allowing them to participate in college hoops, but the NCAA wants to maintain its facade of amateurism.
The NHL does it with no protest from the NCAA, why would the NBA be any different?
To take it to an extreme, why not have some sham team in Europe draft all of OSU's incoming class every year and make the NCAA suspend them, if it were a problem for players to be drafted?
Like I said, I think it's an NCAA issue where they would like to protect their facade of amateurism. I don't think the problem with implementing such a system is on the NBA's end.
Hockey =! Basketball, not even close as far as the NCAA is concerned.
Why does hockey not equal basketball? It's the exact same rulebook.
I meant as far the NCAA is concerned.
NCAA Basketball is a revenue sport, and (IIRC) the NCAA makes most of its money via the tournament. I'd be shocked if NCAA hockey did anything more than lose money for the NCAA. So those two sports are definitely different as far as the NCAA is concerned.
Also, the relationship between NCAA hockey and the NHL is different than the relationship between NCAA basketball and the NBA.
The NHL has a viable minor league system in place, and college hockey makes no money for the NCAA. Not many people pay attention to it, and it's players aren't treated as amateurs in the way that NCAA basketball and football players are.
The NBA needs college basketball to exist as a feeder system, and college basketball needs to exist for the NCAA to make any sort of money what so ever. Therefore, protecting the amateur status of college players is paramount to the NCAA, in order to protect the "purity" of the game.
I also think that they don't want to deal with the logistics of having a myriad of kids with NBA contracts hanging over their heads running around, and having to deal with all of the problems that would create with agents, handlers, and other sordid characticers.
I could go on and on, but suffce it to say, it would create problems that college hockey does not have to deal with, seeing as the money and notoriety are not on the level of basketball. It would open the flood gates to corruption, and completely destroy any semblance of amateurism.
I don't know the hockey system well, but I can't imagine that the drafted players have signed contracts. While their rights are controlled by the teams, they're not receiving money, so the NCAA can maintain the facade of amateurism.
Part of my point was that the NCAA would want nothing to do with that as far as college basketball is concerned.
Things are already dicey enough as it is, so I doubt they'd want to further blur the line between amateur and professional.
The NCAA can do nothing to stop any draft rules the NBA wants to put into place, and they won't change a system for one sport, not in a million years. The NBA could put a rule in place that says if you play in the NCAA, you're ineligible for the first round of their draft, and the NCAA would have no recourse.
Also, hockey picks are worth a lot of money for those able to sign (as I understand it, the NHL minimum is six figures higher than Morris' salary), so it's not likely the NCAA ignores their rules because the NBA still has higher TV ratings than the NHL.
The only problem that I have with this, is that things will most likely go back to the way they were before the one and done rule.
NBA teams will fall in love with high school kids, and start drafting them en masse like they did before the one and done deal. It will also push a lot of kids who otherwise would have gone to college into the draft, because they can't wait three years to get paid due to financial circumstances.
I'm more of a fan of telling all kids they have to go to school for three years, but creating an NBA draft advisory board which kids could petition if they felt they were NBA ready fresh out of high school, or after only one or two years of college.
The draft board would review each case and then make a ruling whether to alllow the kid an exemption, thus allowing them to enter the draft early.
This allows for kids like LeBron or Dwight Howard to bypass college, as they are NBA ready, while protecting kids who need a few years of seasoning and/or maturing, by making them go to college.
I think that the NBA should mandate a three year rule. If kids want to go overseas or to the D-League for three years, fine. But most would stay in college and I think that helps the NBA. The NBA wants recognized names - college is a great place to let basketball fans become familiar with players and let them develop some name recognition. There is a reason Tyler Hansborough and Shane Battier were such interesting draft picks - it is because the basketball loving nation had developed feelings for them and actually cared (love or hate) how they would do in the NBA. There would have been much less interest in both of them had they gone to the NBA after one year (assuming they would have been drafted) I wish more players would recognize that too. Being a huge star at a major university is good for their marketing potential.
But how can you tell adults not to practice their profession if they so desire? A three-year rule with nothing else attached to it is nothing more than the NBA owners saving themselves from themselves.
You can say you need to have a law degree before you can practice law, or a medical degree before you can practice medicine, even if you're the great legal mind ever born and and mastered all the case law before you're 16.
That's not the best analogy. There's stuff you need to learn when you're becoming a lawyer or a doctor whereas you can be physically ready to play in the NBA and have mastered the skillset by the time you're 18. Plus the training ensures competancy when dealing with complex legal issues involving large sums of money or peoples' lives. An incompetent basketball player hurts no one in the grand scheme of things.
The draft is a hiring hall. The collectively bargained contract between the union and the contracted companies determines who is eligible to enter.
But should they be able to? Why can't Kevin Garnett play NBA basketball when he's 18? He was already one of the top 100 or so players in the world.
That's a question that's impossible to answer without going into the politics of organized labor, which is a topic that I'm positive no one here wants to broach.
Our dirty secret, though, is that we talk about potical things all the time. We just don't talk about political parties or address things in overtly political ways. I'm not saying that we should. I'm just saying that the line is a lot more blurry than we sometimes pretend it to be.
I absolutely agree with this, but the unspoken agreement that we keep it covert is what allows this place to keep from degenerating into the rest of the internet.
And "should unions have the right to set rules for work eligibility" seems to me the point where it crosses that line.
You have to have a pretty good reason to bar someone from entering into a profession. With medicine, you're protecting patients from death or injury by people who don't know what they're doing. There's almost nothing like that when it comes to the NBA. Anyway, 18 year old Kevin Garnett was a better basketball player than 21 year old Bobby Hurley.
Gilbert Arenas and his gun collection challenge that statement.
I love collegiate sports more than anything, but I can still see the bs lurking behind the ncaa...
In basketball, those kids should be able to turn pro whenever they want...if a team wants to draft them, best of luck. In football, safety tied to physical development becomes an issue. But in bball, the one-year mandate is just a way of making a lot of young, exciting talent accessible for the march madness stage.
Also: I really hope Burke stays.
Of the top ten scoring leaders this year in the NBA, only one went to college more than two years. Three came fresh out of high school, three were one and dones, two were two year NCAA players (one being LaMarcus Aldridge who had to be talked into going to college by Shaq), and Dirk (I don't know if German A-League is pro which is where he started) and Deron Williams (with 3 years at Illinois). The mindset is that if you "have it" that you don't need the NCAA to improve it.
The all star game roster was pretty much the same.
Once they turn 18, let them go pro whenever they want and in any sport. Let's end the charade.
Do what baseball does, but make it a two-year requirement. You'd have the option of going pro out of HS if you want. If you choose to go to school, you're locked in for two years (or at least, you're not eligible for the draft for two years) but after that you declare whenever. I think that's a fair compromise.
college and or an apprenticeship and go straight to the highest level? Besides that it's in the NBA's best interest to make these kids stay. It would strengthen the NBA, College, and the D-League. They get a small salary in the D-League but can score a very confortable living in Europe for 3 years if they chose to skip college.
What other profession is there, that doesn't require any sort of degree or certification, arbitrarily bars people for a set period of time?
It's good for the NCAA and NBA because players have more time to develop their "brand" in college. It's good for the NBA owners and GM's because they can draft more on evidence and less on potential. It's great for the current players, because it protects their positions on their rosters by creating less of an influx of players for the next three years.
The NFL does this, and it works out fine for them. It would be great for players to have to mature a bit before playing in the NBA so that they are able to represent their product better.
I know it would depirve ten or twenty players a year the right to make a bunch of money, but the current way is screwed up. Players who bolt after one year, turn out to be second round or UFA, and don't catch on with an NBA team have nothing to "fall back on." Many of them have no social skills other than "kiss my ass, I'm a big time athlete," aren't in high demand in the workplace if they can't get paid to play ball, and don't even know how to pay their own bills.
From an NCAA POV, it doesn't matter, because they have no say. From an NBA POV, it would upgrade their product significantly. All of the stars would eventually make it there anyway, and would be more prepared for the realities of the workplace than galoots like Dwight Howard.