This kinda solidifies my feelings on college basketball. It's a damn shame they won't let kids go straight pro or pay the athletes who stay since it's absolutely against your best interest to be interested in an education if you're a ball player. It's a mockery and a sham
1000% agree with all of this. Whole system is ****** up. ****s over the kids by forcing them to play in school for a year for no compensation and hurts the college bball product as a whole with the best players/teams changing every year (except for Jay Wright because he's the best coach in the biz), instead of watching real programs build like we used to see even 15 years ago when everyone who played college bball wanted to be there since the best of the best entered out of HS. The Big East in the early/mid 2000s was the absolute ****.
At the same time, I must admit, it has made the NBA draft 100x better. That's the one thing the one and done era has positively effected. Because now the best of the best don't get drafted with little available scouting resources and underdeveloped games. They play in the NCAA for a season and there is a lot more information for teams to go off of in terms of scouting and they are much better prepared for the League coming in. The bust rate at the top of the draft is significantly lower than it used to be.
I think the current age restrictions can still work but the NCAA needs to compensate players by at least allowing them to make money on their likeness. Or, preferably, the G-League becomes the NBA equivalent of MLB's farm system and the best of the best get drafted by NBA teams, get paid, play under NBA coaches who prepare/develop them for the NBA game without making them attend bull **** classes (some kind of education on finances would be helpful though); and still enter the big League with the same level of preparedness we see rookies with a year or 2 of college basketball experience having today.
One way or another the current format is broken *** ******** but letting HS kids go straight to the League isn't the right answer either. Honestly, not only does it hurt the teams in the draft picking immature players with less scouting to go off of, but it hurts the kids because too many of them make the leap before they are ready because of financial incentives and end up much worse off long-term than they would have been being a one-and-done.
But yeah, it also kind of pushes upper classmen to the side. Rarely will you see a junior/senior getting drafted in the lottery unless they make a special kind of leap like Mikal or it's just a weak *** draft like 2 years ago when Kris Dunn, Buddy Hield, Taurean Prince, and Denzel Valentine were all lottery picks. That hasn't been the case the last 2 years. Which is why Grayson missed his window to be a lottery pick. In addition to being younger, it was also a weak *** draft class.
