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Absolutely insane.
2025 NBA Draft Thread
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by addict4sneakers,
- Start date
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The "double draft" in 2024 could be nuts.
The 23 and 24 hs classes are quite weak tho…so a double draft may enhance its quality a bit.
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The hype got to his head a while ago. This is just another domino crashing down.
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HOU$TON
formerly convertibleburt
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Having Rafael take over for chad ford on the locked on draft pods is so refreshing
He’s hungry as hell you can tell. I thought ford was mailing it in somewhat and living his best life in Hawaii
Anyway, Rafael saying he believes the Thompson twins are franchise changing talents and are #3 and 4 on his big board
And feels that keynonte could be a dame level pro
High praise
He’s hungry as hell you can tell. I thought ford was mailing it in somewhat and living his best life in Hawaii
Anyway, Rafael saying he believes the Thompson twins are franchise changing talents and are #3 and 4 on his big board
And feels that keynonte could be a dame level pro
High praise
HOU$TON
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I’m not as high on Ausar but I agree about Amen
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Last year I lost considerable interest in watching college ball for the pro prospects, especially compared to the 2021 class
This year the interest is byke byke. Ignite, victor, OTE- gotta find the time to sit and watch everyone lol
This year the interest is byke byke. Ignite, victor, OTE- gotta find the time to sit and watch everyone lol
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On Isaiah Collier and how Cincinnati is recruiting the nation’s No. 1 point guard
Wes Miller and his Cincinnati staff have put themselves in the midst of a high-stakes, heavyweight recruiting battle for five-star 2023 point guard Isaiah Collier, and the Bearcats’ coaches have the strength of their own talent evaluation to thank for it.
Collier — a 6-foot-4, 200-pound prospect from Wheeler High School outside of Atlanta — shot up to claim the No. 1 spot in 247Sports’ 2023 rankings just a few weeks ago. He’s No. 4 in the country according to the 247Sports Composite rating, in which he is also considered the top point guard in the 2023 class. With the latest recruiting contact period opening Sept. 9 and Collier still uncommitted, there has been significant interest in the direction and status of his recruitment, and the Bearcats are right in the thick of it. Cincinnati is a finalist for Collier, along with Michigan and USC, because of how Miller and his staff have prioritized the point guard for months.
“Wes has done a great job of building a relationship with him. Wes is a point guard, and one of his biggest attributes is the potential for Zay to be coached by a guy who played his position,” said Larry Thompson, the head coach at Wheeler. “The kid is too young to understand the history of Cincinnati basketball. That’s not a negative, but it just meant nothing to him until he started to learn some of the history. But what does mean something to him is the relationship he’s built with that staff.”
Collier took an official visit to Cincinnati in February, back when he was rated in the 20s by 247Sports. He was still a five-star prospect, and his trip to Clifton still generated considerable buzz among the UC fan base, but from a national perspective, he wasn’t held in the same lofty and coveted regard reserved for a top-rated prospect. That’s a credit to Miller’s talent evaluation and something Collier has appreciated from the beginning of his relationship with the Bearcats head coach.
“As far as I’m concerned, Cincinnati, their eye for recognizing talent was first,” said Darnell “Shep” Shepherd, Collier’s trainer and an assistant varsity coach at Wheeler. “There were a lot of other staffs who were looking at other point guards in Zay’s class, but Cincinnati’s staff very early on recognized that he was the best point guard in the country, and they weren’t quiet about it. At all. For us, that really stood out.”
On the court, it has been a strange, disjointed summer for Collier despite his steady climb up the recruiting rankings. After leading Wheeler to the 2022 state quarterfinals and coming just shy of a third straight Georgia state championship, Collier was diagnosed with a meniscus injury at the USA Basketball U18 workouts in late May.
“That was something he had been dealing with for a while, toward the latter part of our high school season,” Shepherd said. “He’s a big, strong kid and a hell of a competitor, so he was probably more hurt than he let on because he was trying to lead us to a state championship.”
It forced him to miss most of the highly scrutinized summer grassroots tournaments, where he had played for Atlanta-based The Skill Factory on the EYBL circuit. He was cleared to resume action in August just in time to participate in the Steph Curry Camp and Under Armour Elite 24, earning MVP honors at both events despite a shortened conditioning runway. That, combined with his performance in the early grassroots sessions and his overall body of work, was enough to continue elevating his recruiting status.
“He’s become a much better shooter of the basketball. He makes better decisions. His all-around game, his poise, his pace has gotten better, and it was already good,” Thompson said. “It’s at a truly, truly elite level now. Some of the things he’s able to do, a lot of his peers aren’t blessed with that ability yet, and it comes natural for him. I’m not saying it’s easy, but he has a great feel.”
As Collier’s stock has continued to rise, Miller has remained devoted to the five-star point guard as Cincinnati’s top 2023 target. The length and consistency of the relationship with Cincinnati, particularly with Miller and assistants Andre Morgan and Chad Dollar, has resonated with Collier and his family members, who hosted the Bearcats’ coaches for an in-home visit on Sept. 11.
“The staff has been awesome. Not overbearing but enough that you can’t forget about them and you know that Zay is a priority for them,” Shepherd said. “They’ve kept the recruiting about Cincinnati, haven’t negatively recruited. Coach Miller has done an amazing job of talking about himself and the future of the program and where it is right now, not being afraid to say that they will get better and he thinks Isaiah is a prime candidate to speed that process up.”
A similar approach has served Cincinnati well with Collier’s teammate, Arrinten Page, a 6-9, 220-pound center and four-star prospect who is rated 52nd overall in the 2023 class according to his 247Sports Composite grade.
“They made him a priority,” Thompson said. “It seems to me that is just what (the Cincinnati coaches) do. The building of relationships, I don’t think anybody has done a better job with either one of those kids about what is important to them as individuals.”
Page — who recently named Cincinnati as one of his four college finalists alongside USC, Indiana and Miami — was viewed by a number of programs early on as a package deal with Collier, which was understandable considering how well his game complemented Collier’s and how he benefited from playing with an elite point guard. But the Bearcats took a different tack.
“What was different about Cincy’s approach is that they had a specific plan outside of the other schools who were recruiting Zay and AP at the same time. Cincinnati quickly identified his skill set,” Shepherd said. “Mike Roberts did an amazing job of highlighting what the development process would look like for him. Once it became clear AP would forge his own path, other schools realized they needed to do the same thing and treat him as an individual.”
Miller and assistants had an in-home visit with Page on Sept. 9, and Page is expected on Cincinnati’s campus for an official visit this weekend. (Edgerrin “Jizzle” James Jr., a 2023 four-star point guard out of Florida is also planning to take an official visit this weekend.) Page, who previously visited UC in late May, visited Indiana in late July and will make another trip to USC after his second stop in Clifton.
“He’s going up to Cincinnati at the end of this month and will go out to USC after that,” Shepherd said. “You can probably look for his announcement to come out in early October.”
Collier, on the other hand, doesn’t plan to take any more visits, has no set timeline to announce his decision and — at least for the time being — has no intention of releasing one. There were suggestions earlier in the summer that USC was the favorite, but those close to Collier insist it was all outside noise and hearsay and that none of it was coming from inside Collier’s camp.
“I’m with the kid almost every day, and I couldn’t tell you. Because I don’t know,” Thompson said.
USC is absolutely a contender, but so are Michigan and Cincinnati, with UCLA still in the mix as well. Thompson and Shepherd both stressed that the choice will come down to what Collier feels is the best fit for him and the program he’s joining and will be made on his terms and schedule.
“He is not picking a school because of a name or tradition or the city it’s in. That’s not what he’s about. When he makes his decision, he’s making it based on who has the pieces in place to help him and the team be successful,” Thompson said. “His best attribute is how he shares, and he knows that, so he wants to make that decision based on who is on the roster. It’s a very mature decision that he’s going to make in terms of not caring as much about himself, but the whole totality of a program and team.”
That’s good news for Miller and Cincinnati, who are still deep in the running for a prospect who would be the Bearcats’ highest-rated recruit of the 247Sports era and a potentially program-altering player as they gear up for a move to the Big 12.
“That coaching staff has done an amazing job of recruiting Isaiah and AP for that matter, and have done a good job of blocking out the noise,” Shepherd said. “I can’t say where Isaiah will or will not go, but if he doesn’t pick Cincinnati, it won’t be because they didn’t recruit him in the correct manner.”
Wes Miller and his Cincinnati staff have put themselves in the midst of a high-stakes, heavyweight recruiting battle for five-star 2023 point guard Isaiah Collier, and the Bearcats’ coaches have the strength of their own talent evaluation to thank for it.
Collier — a 6-foot-4, 200-pound prospect from Wheeler High School outside of Atlanta — shot up to claim the No. 1 spot in 247Sports’ 2023 rankings just a few weeks ago. He’s No. 4 in the country according to the 247Sports Composite rating, in which he is also considered the top point guard in the 2023 class. With the latest recruiting contact period opening Sept. 9 and Collier still uncommitted, there has been significant interest in the direction and status of his recruitment, and the Bearcats are right in the thick of it. Cincinnati is a finalist for Collier, along with Michigan and USC, because of how Miller and his staff have prioritized the point guard for months.
“Wes has done a great job of building a relationship with him. Wes is a point guard, and one of his biggest attributes is the potential for Zay to be coached by a guy who played his position,” said Larry Thompson, the head coach at Wheeler. “The kid is too young to understand the history of Cincinnati basketball. That’s not a negative, but it just meant nothing to him until he started to learn some of the history. But what does mean something to him is the relationship he’s built with that staff.”
Collier took an official visit to Cincinnati in February, back when he was rated in the 20s by 247Sports. He was still a five-star prospect, and his trip to Clifton still generated considerable buzz among the UC fan base, but from a national perspective, he wasn’t held in the same lofty and coveted regard reserved for a top-rated prospect. That’s a credit to Miller’s talent evaluation and something Collier has appreciated from the beginning of his relationship with the Bearcats head coach.
“As far as I’m concerned, Cincinnati, their eye for recognizing talent was first,” said Darnell “Shep” Shepherd, Collier’s trainer and an assistant varsity coach at Wheeler. “There were a lot of other staffs who were looking at other point guards in Zay’s class, but Cincinnati’s staff very early on recognized that he was the best point guard in the country, and they weren’t quiet about it. At all. For us, that really stood out.”
On the court, it has been a strange, disjointed summer for Collier despite his steady climb up the recruiting rankings. After leading Wheeler to the 2022 state quarterfinals and coming just shy of a third straight Georgia state championship, Collier was diagnosed with a meniscus injury at the USA Basketball U18 workouts in late May.
“That was something he had been dealing with for a while, toward the latter part of our high school season,” Shepherd said. “He’s a big, strong kid and a hell of a competitor, so he was probably more hurt than he let on because he was trying to lead us to a state championship.”
It forced him to miss most of the highly scrutinized summer grassroots tournaments, where he had played for Atlanta-based The Skill Factory on the EYBL circuit. He was cleared to resume action in August just in time to participate in the Steph Curry Camp and Under Armour Elite 24, earning MVP honors at both events despite a shortened conditioning runway. That, combined with his performance in the early grassroots sessions and his overall body of work, was enough to continue elevating his recruiting status.
“He’s become a much better shooter of the basketball. He makes better decisions. His all-around game, his poise, his pace has gotten better, and it was already good,” Thompson said. “It’s at a truly, truly elite level now. Some of the things he’s able to do, a lot of his peers aren’t blessed with that ability yet, and it comes natural for him. I’m not saying it’s easy, but he has a great feel.”
As Collier’s stock has continued to rise, Miller has remained devoted to the five-star point guard as Cincinnati’s top 2023 target. The length and consistency of the relationship with Cincinnati, particularly with Miller and assistants Andre Morgan and Chad Dollar, has resonated with Collier and his family members, who hosted the Bearcats’ coaches for an in-home visit on Sept. 11.
“The staff has been awesome. Not overbearing but enough that you can’t forget about them and you know that Zay is a priority for them,” Shepherd said. “They’ve kept the recruiting about Cincinnati, haven’t negatively recruited. Coach Miller has done an amazing job of talking about himself and the future of the program and where it is right now, not being afraid to say that they will get better and he thinks Isaiah is a prime candidate to speed that process up.”
A similar approach has served Cincinnati well with Collier’s teammate, Arrinten Page, a 6-9, 220-pound center and four-star prospect who is rated 52nd overall in the 2023 class according to his 247Sports Composite grade.
“They made him a priority,” Thompson said. “It seems to me that is just what (the Cincinnati coaches) do. The building of relationships, I don’t think anybody has done a better job with either one of those kids about what is important to them as individuals.”
Page — who recently named Cincinnati as one of his four college finalists alongside USC, Indiana and Miami — was viewed by a number of programs early on as a package deal with Collier, which was understandable considering how well his game complemented Collier’s and how he benefited from playing with an elite point guard. But the Bearcats took a different tack.
“What was different about Cincy’s approach is that they had a specific plan outside of the other schools who were recruiting Zay and AP at the same time. Cincinnati quickly identified his skill set,” Shepherd said. “Mike Roberts did an amazing job of highlighting what the development process would look like for him. Once it became clear AP would forge his own path, other schools realized they needed to do the same thing and treat him as an individual.”
Miller and assistants had an in-home visit with Page on Sept. 9, and Page is expected on Cincinnati’s campus for an official visit this weekend. (Edgerrin “Jizzle” James Jr., a 2023 four-star point guard out of Florida is also planning to take an official visit this weekend.) Page, who previously visited UC in late May, visited Indiana in late July and will make another trip to USC after his second stop in Clifton.
“He’s going up to Cincinnati at the end of this month and will go out to USC after that,” Shepherd said. “You can probably look for his announcement to come out in early October.”
Collier, on the other hand, doesn’t plan to take any more visits, has no set timeline to announce his decision and — at least for the time being — has no intention of releasing one. There were suggestions earlier in the summer that USC was the favorite, but those close to Collier insist it was all outside noise and hearsay and that none of it was coming from inside Collier’s camp.
“I’m with the kid almost every day, and I couldn’t tell you. Because I don’t know,” Thompson said.
USC is absolutely a contender, but so are Michigan and Cincinnati, with UCLA still in the mix as well. Thompson and Shepherd both stressed that the choice will come down to what Collier feels is the best fit for him and the program he’s joining and will be made on his terms and schedule.
“He is not picking a school because of a name or tradition or the city it’s in. That’s not what he’s about. When he makes his decision, he’s making it based on who has the pieces in place to help him and the team be successful,” Thompson said. “His best attribute is how he shares, and he knows that, so he wants to make that decision based on who is on the roster. It’s a very mature decision that he’s going to make in terms of not caring as much about himself, but the whole totality of a program and team.”
That’s good news for Miller and Cincinnati, who are still deep in the running for a prospect who would be the Bearcats’ highest-rated recruit of the 247Sports era and a potentially program-altering player as they gear up for a move to the Big 12.
“That coaching staff has done an amazing job of recruiting Isaiah and AP for that matter, and have done a good job of blocking out the noise,” Shepherd said. “I can’t say where Isaiah will or will not go, but if he doesn’t pick Cincinnati, it won’t be because they didn’t recruit him in the correct manner.”
VARNELL HILL
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I’m always gonna laugh to myself reading Bryson tiller
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dacomeup
Supporter
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On Isaiah Collier and how Cincinnati is recruiting the nation’s No. 1 point guard
Wes Miller and his Cincinnati staff have put themselves in the midst of a high-stakes, heavyweight recruiting battle for five-star 2023 point guard Isaiah Collier, and the Bearcats’ coaches have the strength of their own talent evaluation to thank for it.
Collier — a 6-foot-4, 200-pound prospect from Wheeler High School outside of Atlanta — shot up to claim the No. 1 spot in 247Sports’ 2023 rankings just a few weeks ago. He’s No. 4 in the country according to the 247Sports Composite rating, in which he is also considered the top point guard in the 2023 class. With the latest recruiting contact period opening Sept. 9 and Collier still uncommitted, there has been significant interest in the direction and status of his recruitment, and the Bearcats are right in the thick of it. Cincinnati is a finalist for Collier, along with Michigan and USC, because of how Miller and his staff have prioritized the point guard for months.
“Wes has done a great job of building a relationship with him. Wes is a point guard, and one of his biggest attributes is the potential for Zay to be coached by a guy who played his position,” said Larry Thompson, the head coach at Wheeler. “The kid is too young to understand the history of Cincinnati basketball. That’s not a negative, but it just meant nothing to him until he started to learn some of the history. But what does mean something to him is the relationship he’s built with that staff.”
Collier took an official visit to Cincinnati in February, back when he was rated in the 20s by 247Sports. He was still a five-star prospect, and his trip to Clifton still generated considerable buzz among the UC fan base, but from a national perspective, he wasn’t held in the same lofty and coveted regard reserved for a top-rated prospect. That’s a credit to Miller’s talent evaluation and something Collier has appreciated from the beginning of his relationship with the Bearcats head coach.
“As far as I’m concerned, Cincinnati, their eye for recognizing talent was first,” said Darnell “Shep” Shepherd, Collier’s trainer and an assistant varsity coach at Wheeler. “There were a lot of other staffs who were looking at other point guards in Zay’s class, but Cincinnati’s staff very early on recognized that he was the best point guard in the country, and they weren’t quiet about it. At all. For us, that really stood out.”
On the court, it has been a strange, disjointed summer for Collier despite his steady climb up the recruiting rankings. After leading Wheeler to the 2022 state quarterfinals and coming just shy of a third straight Georgia state championship, Collier was diagnosed with a meniscus injury at the USA Basketball U18 workouts in late May.
“That was something he had been dealing with for a while, toward the latter part of our high school season,” Shepherd said. “He’s a big, strong kid and a hell of a competitor, so he was probably more hurt than he let on because he was trying to lead us to a state championship.”
It forced him to miss most of the highly scrutinized summer grassroots tournaments, where he had played for Atlanta-based The Skill Factory on the EYBL circuit. He was cleared to resume action in August just in time to participate in the Steph Curry Camp and Under Armour Elite 24, earning MVP honors at both events despite a shortened conditioning runway. That, combined with his performance in the early grassroots sessions and his overall body of work, was enough to continue elevating his recruiting status.
“He’s become a much better shooter of the basketball. He makes better decisions. His all-around game, his poise, his pace has gotten better, and it was already good,” Thompson said. “It’s at a truly, truly elite level now. Some of the things he’s able to do, a lot of his peers aren’t blessed with that ability yet, and it comes natural for him. I’m not saying it’s easy, but he has a great feel.”
As Collier’s stock has continued to rise, Miller has remained devoted to the five-star point guard as Cincinnati’s top 2023 target. The length and consistency of the relationship with Cincinnati, particularly with Miller and assistants Andre Morgan and Chad Dollar, has resonated with Collier and his family members, who hosted the Bearcats’ coaches for an in-home visit on Sept. 11.
“The staff has been awesome. Not overbearing but enough that you can’t forget about them and you know that Zay is a priority for them,” Shepherd said. “They’ve kept the recruiting about Cincinnati, haven’t negatively recruited. Coach Miller has done an amazing job of talking about himself and the future of the program and where it is right now, not being afraid to say that they will get better and he thinks Isaiah is a prime candidate to speed that process up.”
A similar approach has served Cincinnati well with Collier’s teammate, Arrinten Page, a 6-9, 220-pound center and four-star prospect who is rated 52nd overall in the 2023 class according to his 247Sports Composite grade.
“They made him a priority,” Thompson said. “It seems to me that is just what (the Cincinnati coaches) do. The building of relationships, I don’t think anybody has done a better job with either one of those kids about what is important to them as individuals.”
Page — who recently named Cincinnati as one of his four college finalists alongside USC, Indiana and Miami — was viewed by a number of programs early on as a package deal with Collier, which was understandable considering how well his game complemented Collier’s and how he benefited from playing with an elite point guard. But the Bearcats took a different tack.
“What was different about Cincy’s approach is that they had a specific plan outside of the other schools who were recruiting Zay and AP at the same time. Cincinnati quickly identified his skill set,” Shepherd said. “Mike Roberts did an amazing job of highlighting what the development process would look like for him. Once it became clear AP would forge his own path, other schools realized they needed to do the same thing and treat him as an individual.”
Miller and assistants had an in-home visit with Page on Sept. 9, and Page is expected on Cincinnati’s campus for an official visit this weekend. (Edgerrin “Jizzle” James Jr., a 2023 four-star point guard out of Florida is also planning to take an official visit this weekend.) Page, who previously visited UC in late May, visited Indiana in late July and will make another trip to USC after his second stop in Clifton.
“He’s going up to Cincinnati at the end of this month and will go out to USC after that,” Shepherd said. “You can probably look for his announcement to come out in early October.”
Collier, on the other hand, doesn’t plan to take any more visits, has no set timeline to announce his decision and — at least for the time being — has no intention of releasing one. There were suggestions earlier in the summer that USC was the favorite, but those close to Collier insist it was all outside noise and hearsay and that none of it was coming from inside Collier’s camp.
“I’m with the kid almost every day, and I couldn’t tell you. Because I don’t know,” Thompson said.
USC is absolutely a contender, but so are Michigan and Cincinnati, with UCLA still in the mix as well. Thompson and Shepherd both stressed that the choice will come down to what Collier feels is the best fit for him and the program he’s joining and will be made on his terms and schedule.
“He is not picking a school because of a name or tradition or the city it’s in. That’s not what he’s about. When he makes his decision, he’s making it based on who has the pieces in place to help him and the team be successful,” Thompson said. “His best attribute is how he shares, and he knows that, so he wants to make that decision based on who is on the roster. It’s a very mature decision that he’s going to make in terms of not caring as much about himself, but the whole totality of a program and team.”
That’s good news for Miller and Cincinnati, who are still deep in the running for a prospect who would be the Bearcats’ highest-rated recruit of the 247Sports era and a potentially program-altering player as they gear up for a move to the Big 12.
“That coaching staff has done an amazing job of recruiting Isaiah and AP for that matter, and have done a good job of blocking out the noise,” Shepherd said. “I can’t say where Isaiah will or will not go, but if he doesn’t pick Cincinnati, it won’t be because they didn’t recruit him in the correct manner.”
Yea, they’ve been on him hard for a while. Would be huge for them to pull off Collier, Davis and Rayvon.
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Had no clue aj Johnson is at Donda and that dorrell Wright was the coach
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I know there's a Rolling Stones article on Donda, but I'd like to know more about the basketball program. How did they get top tier players. Ye can't be that convincing. 
In other news;
In other news;
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I know there's a Rolling Stones article on Donda, but I'd like to know more about the basketball program. How did they get top tier players. Ye can't be that convincing.
In other news;
Last time I heard about Donda they had some kind of controversy with a player leaving his family or dad or something to play over there
I remember being like wut in the actual f
Regarding OTE... what?! There's a draft?
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I know there's a Rolling Stones article on Donda, but I'd like to know more about the basketball program. How did they get top tier players. Ye can't be that convincing.
In other news;
I have no idea why people think Kanye is actually running ANYTHING over there. He partnered with actual educators who had their own idea for a school for the "school" part...and a former pro/trainer who was already looking to start his own program.
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Lowering NBA Draft age minimum doesn’t help anyone. Especially not the players
It’s no secret NBA commissioner Adam Silver has made lowering the NBA Draft age minimum from 19 to 18 a clear priority. He’s brought it up many times over the years and firmly believes the NBA should allow 18-year-olds to enter the draft.
“I’m on record — when I balance all of these various considerations, I think it would be the right thing to do,” Silver said most recently in July. “I am hopeful that that’s a change we make in this next collective bargaining cycle, which will happen in the next couple years.”
This campaign began back in 2017, when he used his annual news conference at All-Star Weekend to float the idea that the age issue needed to be revisited. He publicly cemented his position in the summer of 2018, and the league formally proposed it to the National Basketball Players Association seven months later.
Yet nothing has changed. The rules still state that a player must turn 19 years old within the calendar year of the draft, and that American players must be one full NBA season removed from graduating high school.
Now, for the first time in more than four years, Silver has some traction to achieve his vision. On Monday, The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported that “the NBA and NBA Players Association are expected to agree on moving the age eligibility for the NBA Draft from 19 to 18, clearing the way for the return of high school players making the NBA leap.”
I wouldn’t say this news surprises me, but the impetus for such a change has always been interesting. Sources around the league had historically been somewhere between ambivalent to outwardly hostile about it. As one of the people who lives year-round within this ecosystem, several questions nagged at me. Why now? Does this really help the NBA? Is it really the right thing to do?
After canvassing various NBA, college and youth basketball stakeholders for opinions, I believe the answers to those last two questions is “No.” I don’t think allowing high schoolers back into the NBA will add to the overall health of the league, and I’m not necessarily convinced it’ll benefit the 18-year-olds who would become eligible to enter the NBA workforce. More importantly, if anything changes regarding the overall development of youth basketball players, it will be for the worse. There’s no current problem that lowering the age minimum will solve.
Many of the reasons often floated in favor of the league allowing high schoolers to enter the draft at 18 don’t stand up to scrutiny. The actual level of play within the league will be hindered, not improved, by this move, in part due to a league-wide shift in the way talent evaluators define player value.
But the biggest issue with Silver’s position is that despite its pro-labor roots, it is actually worse for prospective NBA players than the current alternative, not better. What works for a typical workforce will not work for this one.
The NBA is a zero-sum economy
In stating that it’s “the right thing to do” to allow 18-year-olds to go pro, Silver is using pro-labor, pro-freedom rhetoric to push the idea that 18-year-olds are adults in the eyes of the law and should not be barred from making a living with the market value of their skills. I am unequivocally in favor of workers’ rights, so that argument typically holds a lot of sway with me. But within the specific context of the NBA’s current economy, Silver’s position is not actually as pro-labor as it appears on the surface.
The NBA is not an industry like, say, human resources, where there are thousands of companies and no set number of positions. It’s a restricted one with a fixed number of jobs and a set percentage of league revenue earmarked for player salaries (51 percent currently in this collective bargaining agreement, though the percentage could change in future CBAs). Even if the NBA expands, there are always going to be limits on the number of players a team can sign. Currently, those limits are 15 player contracts and two two-way contracts for 30 teams. That equals no more than 450 players on NBA contracts at any one time — 510 if you include two-way deals. The number is set regardless of the age a prospect is eligible to enter the draft.
That means the NBA is a zero-sum market. Any player who gets one of those elusive 450 contracts is taking it away from another potential player. Already, there are a lot of good players who inevitably miss out given the intense competition for any opportunity to play in the highest-paying, most prestigious league in the world.
Many proponents of lowering the age minimum suggest that it’s the league’s prerogative if its members choose to use some of those 450 slots on 18-year-olds. They often cite players such as Skal Labissiere, Cliff Alexander, Trevon Duval, Aaron Harrison and countless others who would have been high draft picks out of high school but lost money from having to wait a year to enter the league. Why prevent them from cashing in when teams were willing to take them high in the draft?
But pro-labor arguments like this downplay the fact that such an arrangement only redistributes their money from another player. Say Labissiere goes No. 2 in the 2015 draft straight out of high school, a likely scenario following his standout performance in front of many NBA scouts and general managers at Hoop Summit in April 2015. That just means the player who would have gone second now goes third, the player who went third would have gone fourth and so on until there’s one fewer draft slot overall and one less guaranteed rookie-scale contract for a different player. The player who goes No. 3 instead of No. 2 now also makes less money under the rookie scale. Assuming Labissiere’s flaws would’ve been as evident as an 18-year-old NBA player as they were in his freshman season at Kentucky, how many players picked below him would have lost money because evaluators were wrong about him?
Remember: NBA owners don’t spend more money when more players enter the NBA Draft. There is a set number of picks, contracts and basketball-related income that the league’s workforce must split.
Young players now have more ways to make money
There’s also a big new piece missing from the above puzzle that cannot be ignored. It makes lowering the age minimum even less necessary for the league’s incoming workforce.
For a long stretch, the NBA really was the only viable option for 18-year-old American players to get paid to play basketball. When Silver made his change of opinion on the age minimum public in 2018, it was in the wake of the FBI’s investigation into illegal payments within college basketball. The NCAA was a wholly amateur endeavor, so players were not allowed to be compensated in any way if they wanted to maintain their eligibility.
At that time, in that ecosystem, I probably would have sided with Silver’s view that 18-year-olds should have the right to try to make a living in the NBA. While I’d still think the NBA’s zero-sum economic structure might make the overall product worse, giving a young adult workforce a path to make money would have simply been the right thing to do. It’s unfair to force 18-year-old American players to choose between going pro in a foreign country, playing for free as amateurs to maintain their collegiate eligibility or potentially receiving impermissible benefits while in college.
But we’re no longer in that era. Players coming out of high school today have many more ways to be compensated for their skills.
We’re in the NIL era of college basketball, where players can get paid fairly handsomely for their work. Miami (Fla.) guard Nijel Pack — a borderline NBA prospect who made first-team All-Big 12 last year — signed a name, image and likeness deal with Hurricanes’ booster John Ruiz’s company LifeWallet for $400,000 per year. That’s not far off from the salary of an NBA two-way contract. Kentucky big man Oscar Tshiebwe is expected to make in the neighborhood of $2 million, the equivalent of the 25th overall draft pick on the NBA’s 2022-23 rookie scale. That’s on top of the well-established, ready-made infrastructure that college basketball already possessed to help set up young adults for success down the road. Many schools now have lifetime scholarships for players who turn pro early even after one year. The NCAA has mandated that all men’s and women’s college basketball players who are on campus for at least two years can return and complete their degree on scholarship if they have left in good academic standing.
Non-college options for high school graduates have dramatically improved as well. The Overtime Elite program, which began play in 2021-22, guarantees every player it accepts a salary of at least $100,000, with more money available for standout signings. It has contracts with players such as Amen and Ausar Thompson — potential top-10 picks in the 2023 NBA Draft — and Ryan and Matt Bewley, who signed a deal that will pay each of them seven figures over two years. The international marketplace has improved with programs such as Next Stars in Australia, where the NBL helps its teams sign young, talented players by supplementing their salary. (LaMelo Ball is its most famous alum but hardly the only one.) The NBA itself even entered the fold by creating the G League Ignite, a team largely made up of highly talented young players and supplemented by veterans who get paid more money than the typical G League player and play games against G League competition. The goal for that program, started in 2020, was to give a pathway to young players not yet eligible for the NBA Draft. Top future picks such as Jalen Green have solidified their stock while reportedly making $500,000 — about one-quarter of what Tshiebwe will make in college this year — to become top draft picks.
As recently as two years ago, Silver’s advocacy for lowering the age minimum would have been solving a real issue for young, American prospects. Now, though, he’s trying to solve a labor fairness issue that doesn’t really exist anymore. The NBA might be a zero-sum game for 18-year-olds, but the NIL marketplace, post-graduate programs and international basketball is not.
Is there a different case for lowering the age minimum to 18?
It’s difficult to find a great answer, but one potential reason floated to me is that the NBA believes it can develop prospects better than any other league, including college. Because of that, it wants more direct control of that pipeline. I’m not sure there is a ton of evidence in support of that view, but let’s take it at face value for a second.
The NBA has noticed that many of its best players right now spent their formative basketball years as overseas pros. Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić are obvious examples. If the NBA is as successful as it think it can be in cultivating that young talent at earlier ages, it could incubate more stars league-wide under its own house. That means more revenue, as star players are the big drivers of the league. The league would then also potentially be in control of the revenue stream while those players rise into becoming stars.
How much better would the NBA have to be at development than those other options to be worth opening its doors to younger prospects? If the league is 5 percent better at developing players, would anyone notice? I doubt it. In truth, the NBA would have to be substantially better at developing 18-year-olds for the league and the players to come out ahead. That’s a big risk to take.
For one, on-court basketball usage is as zero-sum as the actual contracts available. There is only one ball, so if you put it in one potential star’s hands to develop them, you’re taking it out of another’s. The league only possesses so many labels and awards to indicate stardom. There is only one MVP, 15 All-NBA players and 24 All-Stars (plus injury replacements) each season. There can only be 10 “top-10 players in the league.” And of course, there is only one championship to win.
For another, the best way to improve the NBA’s development infrastructure for younger players is to make the G League a true minor league system with a one-to-one team structure. But the G League isn’t exactly a money earner, and its TV deal does not provide nearly as much exposure for prospects as college basketball. If the league’s goal is to create and profit off more stars, I’d argue that Trae Young establishing himself at Oklahoma or Zion Williamson’s year at Duke does that better than sticking them in the G League at 18. Even non-top-five picks like Tyrese Maxey, who went 21st overall in 2020 and likely would have spent a large portion of his rookie season in the G League if he came directly out of high school, gained more brand value for the NBA by attending Kentucky than he would have playing for the Delaware Blue Coats.
Without dramatic improvements in the G League infrastructure, it’s hard to argue the NBA’s own pipeline will do a better job of creating stars for itself sooner than the other available options for 18-year-olds. It’s likely that more of those prospects get lost in the NBA’s imperfect system, not fewer. Why?
The prisoner’s dilemma of the NBA’s risk/reward paradigm
The NBA is a star-driven league. And by and large, those stars tend to come from the top of the draft. For every Giannis or Kawhi Leonard, there are more LeBrons, Lukas, Embiids and Tatums who were top-three picks. In the 15 drafts of the one-and-done era from 2006 to 2020, 31 out of the 75 players selected in the top five went on to achieve All-Star status, a 41.3 percent hit rate. In that same era, only 17 of the 135 players taken from No. 6 to No. 14 made an All-Star game or an All-NBA team, which is just 12.5 percent. Beyond that, only 13 of the 240 players picked from No. 15 to No. 30 in that time frame made an All-Star game or an All-NBA team, a hit rate of just 5.4 percent.
But that doesn’t stop everyone from trying. Teams will always be more willing to accept the gamble of drafting a teenager because the reward of hitting on a star player even once drastically exceeds the risk of them missing far more often. That incentive structure won’t go away. If the age minimum is lowered to 18, instead of there being 19-year-olds in the league who are slightly more polished, there would be 18-year-olds who haven’t played a season above high school basketball or AAU level. What will that mean for the product and the players themselves?
The wider league perspective is that most teenagers, as gifted as they are, aren’t actually good at NBA-level basketball. Most of the veterans in their prime playing in the EuroLeague are better than the teenagers currently in the NBA because they’ve had more time to develop physically and hone their skills. But because of the NBA’s rookie scale and restricted free agency, teams essentially get up to nine years of control on any player they pick in the first round. From their perspective, it’s more valuable to take many home run swings on teenagers and bet that the upside of a small number of them comes to fruition when they’re, say, 24 years old.
Of course, nobody is forcing a team to participate in this star-hunting economy. In theory, each team has the option to select any players eligible to be picked, no matter their age. In practice, this argument doesn’t hold water when stars are so crucial to a team’s success.
The result is the league gets caught up in a prisoner’s dilemma scenario. Teams act rationally in their own best interest by swinging for the fences. But as a whole, it’ll cause the market to reach a suboptimal outcome of having too many of its 450 contracts occupied by players who are even less ready for the league.
“The reality is that you have to take these small probability bets at high upside, and if many of the guys with high upside go straight from high school, you have to participate in that economy with how the system is structured,” an assistant GM told me. “You can’t opt out of that and expect it to work out for you. We’re all going to have to play that game of spending a ton of money to go scout these high school kids, then draft them young and let the vast majority of them fail and eventually you’ll stumble on a diamond in the rough that’ll make it worth it on the team side.”
It’s already happening. Teams are drafting younger than ever, even with the one-and-done rule in place. From 2000 to 2005, 35 players who were either freshmen in college or selected directly from high school were picked in the first round, an average of 5.8 per season. In the 2022 NBA Draft alone, 13 one-and-done players were selected in the first round. In 2021, there were 16 such players. If you count LaMelo Ball, the first six players picked in 2020 were one-and-done prospects, with a final tally of 14 in the first round. I don’t know if those numbers would increase if the age minimum was dropped to 18, but it seems unlikely they’ll decrease.
The difference is that instead of that group being occupied exclusively by 19-year-olds with slightly more polish, it’d be a mix of those and many 18-year-olds who haven’t played a season above high school basketball or AAU level. That year makes a big difference for talent evaluators. The quality of play is much lower at those levels than college or any other post-high school programs, so there is much more variance in figuring out which high school players will turn into the best pros. For example, it is exceedingly difficult to get a read on a player’s feel for the game and ability to transition into an NBA off-ball role when they’re one of the 15 best players in the country in high school. Frankly, they should have the ball in their hand as often as possible at that level of play. But things will be different for them in the NBA, where one ball must be divided between players from a dozen draft classes, top overseas leagues and more.
How inexact is the science of evaluating high-school aged players? Consider the fates of those in the 247Sports’ composite recruiting ranking of prospects in the class of 2021 in the current one-and-done scenario. Among the top 15 players in the class eligible for the 2022 NBA Draft, five were picked in the lottery, three went in the back half of the first round, six were selected in the second round and one had to return to school. That list includes top-35 picks Peyton Watson, Patrick Baldwin and Caleb Houstan, all of whom were taken that high despite struggling last year in college basketball — further emphasizing the point that 18-year-olds are rarely ready to play in the NBA.
Essentially, this reliable metric for the top-15 kids in that class had a one-in-three chance of predicting lottery picks and only a 54 percent hit rate in predicting first-round picks. (Nine of the top 15 in 2020 went in the 2021 first round, nine of the top 15 in 2019 were selected in 2020’s first round, and eight of those players on 2018’s list went in the first round a year later.) Considering these high school evaluators are charged with identifying the best players in a country loaded with hundreds of thousands of high school basketball players every year, it’s impressive those lists were even that accurate. But they’re still so far from being perfect when millions upon millions of dollars are on the line.
Maybe they’ll be better this time. From 2000 to 2005, it was actually good business to draft a high school player compared to the alternative. Many ended up being the best players of that generation, and even several who went later in the draft — Kendrick Perkins, Lou Williams, Monta Ellis and others — carved out successful careers. But I think because the league is already skewing younger with its picks, we’re more likely to see more 18-year-old players picked than the nearly six “high school plus one-and-done” players per season that went in the first round from 2000 to 2005. With an increased supply of teenagers and a decreased amount of information from that extra year of evaluation, logic says the hit rate will be lower than it once was.
That means there will be more diminishing returns on the talent that occupies those 450 roster spots. Teams will end up with more players on their roster who have theoretical upside and fewer veteran players who are already good NBA-level basketball players. I think it’s reasonable to expect a fair amount of NBA contracts to go to developmental players, but I don’t think it benefits anyone to increase that number either. It’ll push out even more veteran players who are good at basketball and potential mentor figures. Owners won’t be happy spending even more money on rookie-scale players who have very little chance of making an NBA impact on their current salary. The quality of in-game play will decrease.
Most of all, the prospects themselves will be worse off because the league’s incentive structure will add more of them to rosters than teams can develop properly. And again, the basketball ecosystem has lowered the barriers for players to make money in leagues better suited toward development.
If the age minimum is lowered despite all that, the league can make some small tweaks to create better avenues for prospects. One assistant GM floated an interesting idea to me: Create a new type of rookie-scale contract where the first year is a two-way contract, but the following seasons automatically convert to a guaranteed pro deal. That would allow teams to feel better about getting more bang for their buck with the first year of some of these younger players while also giving players some financial security to make the jump worthwhile.
But solutions like that are only incremental. While I hardly believe lowering the age minimum will significantly drain the NBA product or be catastrophic for its newly eligible workforce, I don’t think it solves any actual problem that currently exists.
It’s no secret NBA commissioner Adam Silver has made lowering the NBA Draft age minimum from 19 to 18 a clear priority. He’s brought it up many times over the years and firmly believes the NBA should allow 18-year-olds to enter the draft.
“I’m on record — when I balance all of these various considerations, I think it would be the right thing to do,” Silver said most recently in July. “I am hopeful that that’s a change we make in this next collective bargaining cycle, which will happen in the next couple years.”
This campaign began back in 2017, when he used his annual news conference at All-Star Weekend to float the idea that the age issue needed to be revisited. He publicly cemented his position in the summer of 2018, and the league formally proposed it to the National Basketball Players Association seven months later.
Yet nothing has changed. The rules still state that a player must turn 19 years old within the calendar year of the draft, and that American players must be one full NBA season removed from graduating high school.
Now, for the first time in more than four years, Silver has some traction to achieve his vision. On Monday, The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported that “the NBA and NBA Players Association are expected to agree on moving the age eligibility for the NBA Draft from 19 to 18, clearing the way for the return of high school players making the NBA leap.”
I wouldn’t say this news surprises me, but the impetus for such a change has always been interesting. Sources around the league had historically been somewhere between ambivalent to outwardly hostile about it. As one of the people who lives year-round within this ecosystem, several questions nagged at me. Why now? Does this really help the NBA? Is it really the right thing to do?
After canvassing various NBA, college and youth basketball stakeholders for opinions, I believe the answers to those last two questions is “No.” I don’t think allowing high schoolers back into the NBA will add to the overall health of the league, and I’m not necessarily convinced it’ll benefit the 18-year-olds who would become eligible to enter the NBA workforce. More importantly, if anything changes regarding the overall development of youth basketball players, it will be for the worse. There’s no current problem that lowering the age minimum will solve.
Many of the reasons often floated in favor of the league allowing high schoolers to enter the draft at 18 don’t stand up to scrutiny. The actual level of play within the league will be hindered, not improved, by this move, in part due to a league-wide shift in the way talent evaluators define player value.
But the biggest issue with Silver’s position is that despite its pro-labor roots, it is actually worse for prospective NBA players than the current alternative, not better. What works for a typical workforce will not work for this one.
The NBA is a zero-sum economy
In stating that it’s “the right thing to do” to allow 18-year-olds to go pro, Silver is using pro-labor, pro-freedom rhetoric to push the idea that 18-year-olds are adults in the eyes of the law and should not be barred from making a living with the market value of their skills. I am unequivocally in favor of workers’ rights, so that argument typically holds a lot of sway with me. But within the specific context of the NBA’s current economy, Silver’s position is not actually as pro-labor as it appears on the surface.
The NBA is not an industry like, say, human resources, where there are thousands of companies and no set number of positions. It’s a restricted one with a fixed number of jobs and a set percentage of league revenue earmarked for player salaries (51 percent currently in this collective bargaining agreement, though the percentage could change in future CBAs). Even if the NBA expands, there are always going to be limits on the number of players a team can sign. Currently, those limits are 15 player contracts and two two-way contracts for 30 teams. That equals no more than 450 players on NBA contracts at any one time — 510 if you include two-way deals. The number is set regardless of the age a prospect is eligible to enter the draft.
That means the NBA is a zero-sum market. Any player who gets one of those elusive 450 contracts is taking it away from another potential player. Already, there are a lot of good players who inevitably miss out given the intense competition for any opportunity to play in the highest-paying, most prestigious league in the world.
Many proponents of lowering the age minimum suggest that it’s the league’s prerogative if its members choose to use some of those 450 slots on 18-year-olds. They often cite players such as Skal Labissiere, Cliff Alexander, Trevon Duval, Aaron Harrison and countless others who would have been high draft picks out of high school but lost money from having to wait a year to enter the league. Why prevent them from cashing in when teams were willing to take them high in the draft?
But pro-labor arguments like this downplay the fact that such an arrangement only redistributes their money from another player. Say Labissiere goes No. 2 in the 2015 draft straight out of high school, a likely scenario following his standout performance in front of many NBA scouts and general managers at Hoop Summit in April 2015. That just means the player who would have gone second now goes third, the player who went third would have gone fourth and so on until there’s one fewer draft slot overall and one less guaranteed rookie-scale contract for a different player. The player who goes No. 3 instead of No. 2 now also makes less money under the rookie scale. Assuming Labissiere’s flaws would’ve been as evident as an 18-year-old NBA player as they were in his freshman season at Kentucky, how many players picked below him would have lost money because evaluators were wrong about him?
Remember: NBA owners don’t spend more money when more players enter the NBA Draft. There is a set number of picks, contracts and basketball-related income that the league’s workforce must split.
Young players now have more ways to make money
There’s also a big new piece missing from the above puzzle that cannot be ignored. It makes lowering the age minimum even less necessary for the league’s incoming workforce.
For a long stretch, the NBA really was the only viable option for 18-year-old American players to get paid to play basketball. When Silver made his change of opinion on the age minimum public in 2018, it was in the wake of the FBI’s investigation into illegal payments within college basketball. The NCAA was a wholly amateur endeavor, so players were not allowed to be compensated in any way if they wanted to maintain their eligibility.
At that time, in that ecosystem, I probably would have sided with Silver’s view that 18-year-olds should have the right to try to make a living in the NBA. While I’d still think the NBA’s zero-sum economic structure might make the overall product worse, giving a young adult workforce a path to make money would have simply been the right thing to do. It’s unfair to force 18-year-old American players to choose between going pro in a foreign country, playing for free as amateurs to maintain their collegiate eligibility or potentially receiving impermissible benefits while in college.
But we’re no longer in that era. Players coming out of high school today have many more ways to be compensated for their skills.
We’re in the NIL era of college basketball, where players can get paid fairly handsomely for their work. Miami (Fla.) guard Nijel Pack — a borderline NBA prospect who made first-team All-Big 12 last year — signed a name, image and likeness deal with Hurricanes’ booster John Ruiz’s company LifeWallet for $400,000 per year. That’s not far off from the salary of an NBA two-way contract. Kentucky big man Oscar Tshiebwe is expected to make in the neighborhood of $2 million, the equivalent of the 25th overall draft pick on the NBA’s 2022-23 rookie scale. That’s on top of the well-established, ready-made infrastructure that college basketball already possessed to help set up young adults for success down the road. Many schools now have lifetime scholarships for players who turn pro early even after one year. The NCAA has mandated that all men’s and women’s college basketball players who are on campus for at least two years can return and complete their degree on scholarship if they have left in good academic standing.
Non-college options for high school graduates have dramatically improved as well. The Overtime Elite program, which began play in 2021-22, guarantees every player it accepts a salary of at least $100,000, with more money available for standout signings. It has contracts with players such as Amen and Ausar Thompson — potential top-10 picks in the 2023 NBA Draft — and Ryan and Matt Bewley, who signed a deal that will pay each of them seven figures over two years. The international marketplace has improved with programs such as Next Stars in Australia, where the NBL helps its teams sign young, talented players by supplementing their salary. (LaMelo Ball is its most famous alum but hardly the only one.) The NBA itself even entered the fold by creating the G League Ignite, a team largely made up of highly talented young players and supplemented by veterans who get paid more money than the typical G League player and play games against G League competition. The goal for that program, started in 2020, was to give a pathway to young players not yet eligible for the NBA Draft. Top future picks such as Jalen Green have solidified their stock while reportedly making $500,000 — about one-quarter of what Tshiebwe will make in college this year — to become top draft picks.
As recently as two years ago, Silver’s advocacy for lowering the age minimum would have been solving a real issue for young, American prospects. Now, though, he’s trying to solve a labor fairness issue that doesn’t really exist anymore. The NBA might be a zero-sum game for 18-year-olds, but the NIL marketplace, post-graduate programs and international basketball is not.
Is there a different case for lowering the age minimum to 18?
It’s difficult to find a great answer, but one potential reason floated to me is that the NBA believes it can develop prospects better than any other league, including college. Because of that, it wants more direct control of that pipeline. I’m not sure there is a ton of evidence in support of that view, but let’s take it at face value for a second.
The NBA has noticed that many of its best players right now spent their formative basketball years as overseas pros. Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić are obvious examples. If the NBA is as successful as it think it can be in cultivating that young talent at earlier ages, it could incubate more stars league-wide under its own house. That means more revenue, as star players are the big drivers of the league. The league would then also potentially be in control of the revenue stream while those players rise into becoming stars.
How much better would the NBA have to be at development than those other options to be worth opening its doors to younger prospects? If the league is 5 percent better at developing players, would anyone notice? I doubt it. In truth, the NBA would have to be substantially better at developing 18-year-olds for the league and the players to come out ahead. That’s a big risk to take.
For one, on-court basketball usage is as zero-sum as the actual contracts available. There is only one ball, so if you put it in one potential star’s hands to develop them, you’re taking it out of another’s. The league only possesses so many labels and awards to indicate stardom. There is only one MVP, 15 All-NBA players and 24 All-Stars (plus injury replacements) each season. There can only be 10 “top-10 players in the league.” And of course, there is only one championship to win.
For another, the best way to improve the NBA’s development infrastructure for younger players is to make the G League a true minor league system with a one-to-one team structure. But the G League isn’t exactly a money earner, and its TV deal does not provide nearly as much exposure for prospects as college basketball. If the league’s goal is to create and profit off more stars, I’d argue that Trae Young establishing himself at Oklahoma or Zion Williamson’s year at Duke does that better than sticking them in the G League at 18. Even non-top-five picks like Tyrese Maxey, who went 21st overall in 2020 and likely would have spent a large portion of his rookie season in the G League if he came directly out of high school, gained more brand value for the NBA by attending Kentucky than he would have playing for the Delaware Blue Coats.
Without dramatic improvements in the G League infrastructure, it’s hard to argue the NBA’s own pipeline will do a better job of creating stars for itself sooner than the other available options for 18-year-olds. It’s likely that more of those prospects get lost in the NBA’s imperfect system, not fewer. Why?
The prisoner’s dilemma of the NBA’s risk/reward paradigm
The NBA is a star-driven league. And by and large, those stars tend to come from the top of the draft. For every Giannis or Kawhi Leonard, there are more LeBrons, Lukas, Embiids and Tatums who were top-three picks. In the 15 drafts of the one-and-done era from 2006 to 2020, 31 out of the 75 players selected in the top five went on to achieve All-Star status, a 41.3 percent hit rate. In that same era, only 17 of the 135 players taken from No. 6 to No. 14 made an All-Star game or an All-NBA team, which is just 12.5 percent. Beyond that, only 13 of the 240 players picked from No. 15 to No. 30 in that time frame made an All-Star game or an All-NBA team, a hit rate of just 5.4 percent.
But that doesn’t stop everyone from trying. Teams will always be more willing to accept the gamble of drafting a teenager because the reward of hitting on a star player even once drastically exceeds the risk of them missing far more often. That incentive structure won’t go away. If the age minimum is lowered to 18, instead of there being 19-year-olds in the league who are slightly more polished, there would be 18-year-olds who haven’t played a season above high school basketball or AAU level. What will that mean for the product and the players themselves?
The wider league perspective is that most teenagers, as gifted as they are, aren’t actually good at NBA-level basketball. Most of the veterans in their prime playing in the EuroLeague are better than the teenagers currently in the NBA because they’ve had more time to develop physically and hone their skills. But because of the NBA’s rookie scale and restricted free agency, teams essentially get up to nine years of control on any player they pick in the first round. From their perspective, it’s more valuable to take many home run swings on teenagers and bet that the upside of a small number of them comes to fruition when they’re, say, 24 years old.
Of course, nobody is forcing a team to participate in this star-hunting economy. In theory, each team has the option to select any players eligible to be picked, no matter their age. In practice, this argument doesn’t hold water when stars are so crucial to a team’s success.
The result is the league gets caught up in a prisoner’s dilemma scenario. Teams act rationally in their own best interest by swinging for the fences. But as a whole, it’ll cause the market to reach a suboptimal outcome of having too many of its 450 contracts occupied by players who are even less ready for the league.
“The reality is that you have to take these small probability bets at high upside, and if many of the guys with high upside go straight from high school, you have to participate in that economy with how the system is structured,” an assistant GM told me. “You can’t opt out of that and expect it to work out for you. We’re all going to have to play that game of spending a ton of money to go scout these high school kids, then draft them young and let the vast majority of them fail and eventually you’ll stumble on a diamond in the rough that’ll make it worth it on the team side.”
It’s already happening. Teams are drafting younger than ever, even with the one-and-done rule in place. From 2000 to 2005, 35 players who were either freshmen in college or selected directly from high school were picked in the first round, an average of 5.8 per season. In the 2022 NBA Draft alone, 13 one-and-done players were selected in the first round. In 2021, there were 16 such players. If you count LaMelo Ball, the first six players picked in 2020 were one-and-done prospects, with a final tally of 14 in the first round. I don’t know if those numbers would increase if the age minimum was dropped to 18, but it seems unlikely they’ll decrease.
The difference is that instead of that group being occupied exclusively by 19-year-olds with slightly more polish, it’d be a mix of those and many 18-year-olds who haven’t played a season above high school basketball or AAU level. That year makes a big difference for talent evaluators. The quality of play is much lower at those levels than college or any other post-high school programs, so there is much more variance in figuring out which high school players will turn into the best pros. For example, it is exceedingly difficult to get a read on a player’s feel for the game and ability to transition into an NBA off-ball role when they’re one of the 15 best players in the country in high school. Frankly, they should have the ball in their hand as often as possible at that level of play. But things will be different for them in the NBA, where one ball must be divided between players from a dozen draft classes, top overseas leagues and more.
How inexact is the science of evaluating high-school aged players? Consider the fates of those in the 247Sports’ composite recruiting ranking of prospects in the class of 2021 in the current one-and-done scenario. Among the top 15 players in the class eligible for the 2022 NBA Draft, five were picked in the lottery, three went in the back half of the first round, six were selected in the second round and one had to return to school. That list includes top-35 picks Peyton Watson, Patrick Baldwin and Caleb Houstan, all of whom were taken that high despite struggling last year in college basketball — further emphasizing the point that 18-year-olds are rarely ready to play in the NBA.
Essentially, this reliable metric for the top-15 kids in that class had a one-in-three chance of predicting lottery picks and only a 54 percent hit rate in predicting first-round picks. (Nine of the top 15 in 2020 went in the 2021 first round, nine of the top 15 in 2019 were selected in 2020’s first round, and eight of those players on 2018’s list went in the first round a year later.) Considering these high school evaluators are charged with identifying the best players in a country loaded with hundreds of thousands of high school basketball players every year, it’s impressive those lists were even that accurate. But they’re still so far from being perfect when millions upon millions of dollars are on the line.
Maybe they’ll be better this time. From 2000 to 2005, it was actually good business to draft a high school player compared to the alternative. Many ended up being the best players of that generation, and even several who went later in the draft — Kendrick Perkins, Lou Williams, Monta Ellis and others — carved out successful careers. But I think because the league is already skewing younger with its picks, we’re more likely to see more 18-year-old players picked than the nearly six “high school plus one-and-done” players per season that went in the first round from 2000 to 2005. With an increased supply of teenagers and a decreased amount of information from that extra year of evaluation, logic says the hit rate will be lower than it once was.
That means there will be more diminishing returns on the talent that occupies those 450 roster spots. Teams will end up with more players on their roster who have theoretical upside and fewer veteran players who are already good NBA-level basketball players. I think it’s reasonable to expect a fair amount of NBA contracts to go to developmental players, but I don’t think it benefits anyone to increase that number either. It’ll push out even more veteran players who are good at basketball and potential mentor figures. Owners won’t be happy spending even more money on rookie-scale players who have very little chance of making an NBA impact on their current salary. The quality of in-game play will decrease.
Most of all, the prospects themselves will be worse off because the league’s incentive structure will add more of them to rosters than teams can develop properly. And again, the basketball ecosystem has lowered the barriers for players to make money in leagues better suited toward development.
If the age minimum is lowered despite all that, the league can make some small tweaks to create better avenues for prospects. One assistant GM floated an interesting idea to me: Create a new type of rookie-scale contract where the first year is a two-way contract, but the following seasons automatically convert to a guaranteed pro deal. That would allow teams to feel better about getting more bang for their buck with the first year of some of these younger players while also giving players some financial security to make the jump worthwhile.
But solutions like that are only incremental. While I hardly believe lowering the age minimum will significantly drain the NBA product or be catastrophic for its newly eligible workforce, I don’t think it solves any actual problem that currently exists.
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[Non contrarian take]
I think Victor Wembanayama is an excellent basketball prospect and the likely number 1 pick in the draft.
[/Non contrarian take]
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You tried to be that guy but showed restrainti hate to be that guy again,
obviously it looks cool but seems totally unnecessary for a 7'4 guy to be doing all that.
it's not like they are gunna block your shot, just stand there and shoot.
I’m glad you fully on board now tho
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I was actually never not on board.
you need only read what I wrote about this;
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In that post you state that you are well aware of his tendencies lol
but anyway, we're all fortunate that the sport keeps evolving
dacomeup
Supporter
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OTE faces Bronny, Boozer twins in 90-game slate
Overtime Elite announced it's 90-game upcoming schedule and features games against Bronny James and ESPN's top player in the 2025 class, Cam Boozer.
So are these kids no longer playing for high schools? Confused by Bronny and Bryce with the California Basketball Club stuff
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well yah like I said he gets all attention for the more fancy less practical plays that gets put in highlight reels.
but when you actually watch him play full games, he does the traditional big man stuff
which makes him a "generational prospect."
aka I was always on board.
