(02-28-2018 03:00 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(02-28-2018 10:04 AM)arkstfan Wrote:  

(02-28-2018 08:11 AM)solohawks Wrote:  Even if the G League paid a good enough wage, it would be hard to replicate the media attention a star college athlete currently receives. Intangibles like that are hard to quantify.

Unless fans figure out the next NBA superstar is playing in the G League instead of the next career journeyman. Won't be the same media level but it would do wonders for the G League tv deal.

The difference is that the next NBA superstar wouldn't ever spend time in the G League - they'd head directly to the NBA club just like Kobe, LeBron and Dwight Howard did before them.

The other complexity is that the stakes of making a correct pick in the NBA Draft (especially at the top of the lottery) are *insanely* high compared to the NFL and MLB. It's never great to whiff on a first round draft pick in the NFL or MLB, but winning in those sports still require so much depth that you can make it up with good picks in later rounds of the draft and/or free agency and keep your franchise on track.

What makes the NBA different is that making the right or wrong top pick can truly be franchise altering for a decade or more. The Pistons would have been a dynasty on the level of the Spurs or Lakers if they had picked *anyone* in the top 5 of the NBA Draft other than their choice of Darko Milicic. The NBA is a megastar league and you're not winning without a top 10 player (or more appropriately, multiple top 10 players).

As a big fan of both the NBA and college basketball, I do think people need to step back and look at the bigger picture as to why it's inherently different than the draft processes for other sports. It's easy enough to say that the 1-and-done rule is bad or that there should be a separate minor league system or that there should be a baseball-type rule where you can either enter the draft out of high school or go to college for 2 years. The challenge with any of those thoughts is that it doesn't really address the core issue: when the stakes are so much more dramatically higher for an NBA draft pick compared to an NFL/MLB draft pick both for the players and the teams, it means that the incentives and disincentives are so out of whack that you basically have roulette wheel behavior (which results in guys like Sebastian Telfair and Jonathan Bender getting drafted out of high school or, even worse undrafted high schoolers that lose their college eligibility forever, which all occurred prior to the 1-and-done era).

I just think a lot of people have collective amnesia of how bad the period prior to the 1-and-done era was for both the NBA and college basketball. There were too many high school kids that sincerely believed that they were going to be top 10 players declaring for the draft, which drained the college basketball talent pool. At the same time, there were too many NBA executives placing roulette bets on untested high school kids to be the next LeBron (and once again, that's no big deal in MLB where you have dozens of draft picks per year, but a franchise-altering-for-decades deal when you're getting a top NBA lottery pick only once every few years in a lot of cases). I'm not saying that I like the 1-and-done rule, but the free for all of high school kids declaring for the NBA Draft was really bad for basketball all around at the top levels.

So, I don't really have a great answer, but that's what I see as the core issue. Ultimately, the NBA should be doing what's best for the NBA. They're the ones with the product that has franchises worth billions of dollars each, so they should have the power to impose as many or as few restrictions on who can get drafted as they see fit for their business. As long as the NCAA doesn't pay its players, they can only be bystanders on this issue.

Risking a $100,000 or $200,000 signing bonus to put a high school kid who looks like a college one and done to put him on a G League team seems like a good risk to me. If you can be successful on a 50 game G League schedule, you now can risk a first round draft pick much more safely.

Kid doesn't like that, let him go to college for three years.

Every night in the G League you are facing guys who have played NBA or who will be called up soon. In college you may not face a G League caliber player much less NBA more than once or twice in non-conference play.