I applaud Omniscient for complaining about bigotry and then bashing “ghetto football players” in the same post. That’s Division I level irony!
As I said, I know that’s what Silver is saying, but I don’t believe it is as high a priority as he says it is, and I don’t believe it is ever going to come to fruition. Maybe someday it will, but I am skeptical.
30 D-league teams? Is there a market for that much basketball? I don’t see it. Of course, I don’t have the marketing studies in front of me.
I will say this. If it does work, that would be great, and would permit kids who don’t want to go to college to go straight to the D-league, just like baseball players can do today. This would permit NBA teams to draft high school kids and keep them in the D-league for a year or two, and when they come to the NBA, they will be much more likely to succeed.
I’d have no problem with this. I think it would be great for those kids who just want to chase their basketball dream (and not chase a diploma) a place to go where they can focus, get paid, and not worry about breaking some old NCAA regulation that doesn’t permit them to take a slice of free pizza from someone.
It will also stop programs like Kentucky from getting 5 new players every year to hang out on a campus, take bogus courses to maintain eligibility, and try to win the NCAA tournament. I think we’d see a lot more teams with 4 year players on their rosters, and graduation rates would go up. If a kid is good enough to go to the pros right out of high school, and the D-leauge is a viable option, i think that would cut down on the number of kids going to D-1 programs that have no desire to go to college.
I just don’t see, however, the NBA taking on the added expense of a full-blown D-league when the college system is already set up for them, and it doesn’t cost them a dime. But if they can turn a profit on a D-League, great.
I do think they want that- and it would also help the owners by allowing them to postpone big paydays for their players in the same way that raising the age limit would. So I’m not sure what the NBA players will say about it.
That is something to consider, for sure. I am sure someone has crunched the numbers on it.
Think about how good it would be for an NBA team to draft a Kwame Brown and pay him a minimum base contract… Whatever the players union and management agreed to, and they could try him out for a year or three in a D-league. That would be great for everyone except the drafted kid (financially, anyway). And even for him, it might not be terrible. He wouldn’t have the pressure to succeed from day one in the NBA. He could get better in a lower league, which is how it should be done.
I’m sure the draft picks would complain, and their agents, but they have little bargaining power. Whatever money the teams save could be distributed amongst the current NBA players, always a popular move.
I would love to see an NBA minor league system to come into the picture.
The underlying, and sometimes boiling over, suggestion by some posts that student athletes should be grateful and take what they’re given and that they’re being greedy for wanting to bargain for their compensation and that it’s their own fault if they end up illiterate with no useful education has a very distinct odor of race prejudice.
If you mean a player out of high school, sure. Not a top draft pick.
NBA rookie contracts are already very favorable to teams, so players don’t have a chance to become “true” free agents until they’ve played for four seasons. If there’s a full minor league, that might get pushed back another year or two. The effect is that players reach free agency fewer times over the length of a career and have fewer shots at a big payday. So the players’ union is going to have its say about this and it will be on the side of the draft picks: NBA players will interpret this as an attempt to limit their free agency opportunities and pay them less money (which it is). That’s not to say there’s nothing good about having a real NBA minor league and allowing the players to get paid, but there is some stuff they will have to work out.
If you are talking about kid who is eligible to play in the NBA from day 1, i’m not referring to him, obviously. But he, I would imagine, would be covered under a different salary structure, because he wouldn’t have to be sent automatically to the D-league.
But however it is hashed out, i think it could h beneficial to everyone. There is certainly enough money to go around.
Of course. There is always give and take. My point was and is, the teams will be taking less risk by rolling the dice on a high school kid who they cannot draft now. If the NBA wants, it can change the age limit again to be 18, which would permit the players to be drafted instead of having to enter a college for at least a year. The only way they could do this without changing their age-limits now is to have another place for the kid to go. The D-league would be a perfect landing spot for a kid not old enough to play in the NBA, but who wants to skip college and make money by playing basketball.
If you know of anyone in the NBA offices, I’d be happy to go and work for them to work this all out. I have an MBA, and I love money and numbers, so this would be a great project to work on.
I was just pointing out that Brown was a #1 overall pick, and a player like that probably won’t get sent to the D League.
Right. Interestingly, they don’t seem interested in lowering the age limit. When the issue comes up they talk about raising it (again, because the owners would save money). But they could have the makings of a good system here.
I know Brown was the 1st overall. But why do you think he wouldn’t be sent down to the D league? Are you saying that it would be impossible to send a top pick down because that would be admitting you made a mistake with the pick? Is the guy picked at number 1 overall supposed to make your team and start from day one?
I think that might be true today, but who knows what things will look like if the NBA has a minor league of sorts? I can see a team rolling the dice on a kid just out of high school that isn’t ready for the NBA just yet, but everyone thinks in two or three years, he will be a stud.
I know it is hard to imagine taking someone in today’s environment that you wouldn’t play right away, but very few rookies set the league on fire… Perhaps if the seasoning in the D-league was seen as a positive, more teams would draft high school kids and let them develop. Two reasons for this. One, you keep a kid from all other teams in the league, and you have a chance to teach him “your way”. Two, you get him in your system before he goes away to a college or overseas.
I think if the NBA had an age requirement that forced kids to go to college (Or the d-league) for 2-3 years before going to the NBA, most wouldn’t view a stop in the D-league as a negative. But there have been so few kids that made the high school to pro leap successfully, a few years seasoning would be a good idea.
There has been LeBron, Kobe, Moses Malone, and who else? In all those years of drafting kids out of high school, I can’t think of anyone else off the top of my head other than those three who went on to become super stars. College, or a minor league, would be a better solution.
I think a few things will happen if this goes down the road I see it going down.
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congress will get involved. The issues are too complex, and law makers will have to re-evaluate a number of definitions that they’ve been using for years, like “amateur” and “non-profit”.
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title IX may get revisited. if colleges can show that they use the vast football and basketball earnings to fund other athletic programs, there may be a wholesale canceling of other programs, and the idea of keeping a one-to-one ration of boys to girls athletic scholarships may no longer be a viable answer.
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collateral damage - i can see schools crying poor if they have to pay the players, and this will hurt the non-revenue generating sports. Anywhere a school can re-coup their money that has to be paid to players will be looked at hard to see if cutting another program/sport/whatever can help return the revenue to the schools bottom line.
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the courts will get involved. They already have, but I can see something like this going all the way to the SCOTUS. and how will private and public schools differ with any rulings? And will each state be permitted or require to answer these questions for public schools that receive state funding?
There are more. But I’m tired and i am not getting a consulting fee for this. So I call it a night.
When I was in grad school, I received a tuition waiver and a small stipend. I see no reason why meritorious athletes at the undergraduate level cannot receive the same deal especially when they typically work harder than their non-athlete peers. LOL@privilege. Really? I think its a privilege for the schools to have their athletes, milk money off their sweat and tears, and provide (in a lot of cases) a substandard education. The fact that most of these athletes are African-American has not escaped my attention, either.
- Honesty
With a #1 pick? Usually. But I think maybe we’re getting off on a tangent- the Wizards that year were a weird example. Teams don’t mind drafting a player who needs a couple of years of experience and an expanded D League would be good for that purpose. You’d like to have a sure thing if you’re drafting #1, but if you are a bit lower in the lottery and don’t plan to contend for a few years, this is an option that might sense for your team.
You did forget a bunch: Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard, Tracy McGrady, Amare’ Stoudemire, Tyson Chandler, and there are several other solid players in there. 10 of those players played in at least one All-Star Game. I’ll say five are/were Hall of Famers. That’s a pretty high success rate considering only 42 players were drafted straight out of high school. There are plenty of guys who have come out of school too early for one reason or another, but that’s probably a high success rate (probably because many of these guys were just overwhelmingly talented). The expanded D League would have some major player development uses- I think we agree about that. But to me the big issue here is that the players would be compensated. If the NBA is the goal you are working toward, you should get rewarded for your work instead of having the college reap all the reward while you as a player assume all the risk.
Yeah, I did miss a few. Forgot them actually, but I follow the NBA the least of all the major sports. I shouldn’t have forgotten Kevin Garnett, though.
Yeah, we did get on a tangent. I think we fundamentally agree on the base issue, which is the kids that are playing and making all that money for their schools should be paid for their work. That’s the key point.
How that’s going to play out I don’t think anyone knows. But I think we agree that the time has come.
I’d love to be a part of the panel that will be charged with working this problem out.
I think they would given how badly he performed. Didn’t Memphis’s #2 or #3 pick get sent down to the D-League this year and last? Forgot his name.
Anyways, for busts like Brown, or guys who are clearly not ready but are huge prospects (Olowokandi, Darko), I can see the teams drafting them then sending them down for a year or half a season.
The players should be forbidden? The schools invite them, they recruit them, they actively pursue these players in the hopes that they will join the team and play under the school’s banner.
A player with a 5th grade reading level submits a bad 1 paragraph term paper, and you’re mad at the kid for not taking his education seriously. What about the administrators who enrolled someone with no academic skills, the department head who allows the existence of a “no show” class for athletes, and the professor who gave that terrible work an A-?
The kid is simply using the only notable skill he has, sport, to improve his future prospects, and utilizes those opportunities offered to him. Why do you hate the players so much?
Public support running more evenly split than I had previously thought. From ESPN.com:
When people really think about this issue, they will be hard pressed to justify supporting the status quo. The schools have been counting on people not really thinking about it. Another oops for them.
Of course, there are plenty of people who are going to insist on not thinking.
The people who bother me more are the ones who think the popularity of the current system justifies the illegal restrictions on the students. And the people who bother me the most are the ones who want to maintain the current rules because their school’s rivals may outspend them on players.
I agree, although i have a caveat or two. I’m not sure who the prof was in the UNC case that got so much publicity last week, but as someone who teaches college (although not at a big athletics school), i’d like to offer something of a defense of the professors in these situations.
The American university and college system is, despite the inflation-smashing rise in the cost of tuition over the past decade, increasingly populated by adjunct instructors. Over half of all university courses are now taught by poorly-paid adjuncts with absolutely no guarantee of job security, and this is not just the case at crappy third-tier universities. Even a massive, prestigious public university like Ohio State, which ranks around #52 in the nation according US News, and which is a powerhouse football school, has 65% of its faculty (two-thirds) hired on a contingent basis.
Imagine yourself as an adjunct faculty member at a place like this. You’re probably being paid between three and four thousand dollars per course, which means that if you don’t get many courses, you have to find work elsewhere and rush back and forth between schools to teach your classes. If you do get enough courses to put together a decent income, you are teaching so many students that you’re working 60 or 70 hours a week just to keep up with your class prep, grading, office hours, etc., etc.
Then you get a piece of shit essay for which a grade of “F” would be over-the-top generosity. You give the essay the failing grade it deserves, and the next thing you know you have someone from the “Academic Success” (or some other bullshit name) office knocking on your door and politely explaining that you really need to do more to ensure that this student passes your class. You explain that the student will pass the class when the student produces passing-level work.
The whole situation escalates, with Academic Success, and sometimes even the coaching staff themselves, going to your Department Chair and then to your Dean or Provost. You are then informed by your Chair that this one is not worth fighting, and that, if you can’t see your way clear to passing the student, the university will have to consider whether you’re truly committed to its educational mission when classes are being allocated the following semester.
Even tenured faculty at some of the big sporting schools cave in under pressure to pass athletes. We certainly can’t expect adjunct faculty—the academic equivalent of fast-food workers—to hold up the standards when their ability to put food on the table and a roof over their head is being threatened. And why should they, when the very university they work for, the place that is supposed to be the upholder of academic rigor and integrity, has made clear that football (or basketball) is much more important to the school’s mission than whether or not a student can produce a coherent piece of analytical writing?
While I don’t disagree that faculty - especially adjuncts - are put in increasingly untenable positions, that wasn’t the case at UNC. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess the professor in that case was department chair and full professor Julius Nyang’oro, who’s been indicted for what amounts to academic fraud. I know it’s being trotted out as “this is what these athletes are turning in,” but it’s hardly a typical example.
Unfortunately, I suspect it 's not as atypical as UNC and other schools would have you believe either.
I think you need to re-read that. The ghetto comment was an example of the bigotry, and not my opinion.