Stop Blaming One-and-Done For Problems With NBA Draft

Last week’s NBA Draft went completely off the rails around the 10th pick, when the Milwaukee Bucks took a flier on age-fluid big man Thon Maker. From there, you would have been better off picking names out of a hat than trying to predict what would happen next.

Draft experts spent most of the last year decrying this class, describing it as weak and filled with (at best) a horde of future role-players aside from the top tier of talent. When a phenomenon like this happens, everyone looks for something to blame.

The NBA’s one-and-done rule is the subject of constant scrutiny on that front, and ESPN’s Rachel Nichols was one of the more outspoken voices in dissent:

I don’t intend to use Nichols as a punching bag; she’s a valued voice in the NBA community and someone whose work I respect deeply. But that’s sort of the reason I use this version of the argument as an example — I think the people driving conversation can do much better than this.

The argument used here is almost completely incoherent. In one breath, Nichols claims that the excitement level of the draft was hindered by the order of selection, with international players like Georgios Papagiannis leaping over the best the NCAA had to offer despite not being starters on their own teams overseas.

This isn’t a great argument in a vacuum — famous NCAA bench prodigies like Russell Westbrook and Dion Waiters were also selected high despite their seat-warming status — but it’s made even worse by where the argument heads next:

"All college is doing these days is giving scouts a 31-game schedule to find out these kids are, shocker, not ready to play in the NBA. So instead of selecting one of them, a team like Milwaukee decides I’d rather take a flier on a guy like Thon Maker who’s all mysterious possibility, or a team like the Kings decides it would rather draft Georgios Papagiannis who has spent the last year as a bench player in Greece.…This is a league for grown-ups, and it is time that it’s formally acknowledged by moving the age-limit here up to 20. NBA teams will get better developed players who actually know how to play a complete game of basketball, they can better weed out the flame-out disappointments that set franchises and, frankly their fans, years back."

If one-and-done is to blame for exposing college talent to too much scrutiny from scouts relative to international men of mystery, adding another year under the microscope will only amplify the current problem. An American league (and fans) largely concerned with American players and the American talent pipeline is unlikely to subject the international players to the same standard as the boys back home. For one, that’s nearly impossible to do.

One reason is the practical difficulty of doing so; I could turn on ESPN, Fox Sports or CBS and see most of this year’s top NCAA prospects ply their trade night after night. Watching full games for Dragan Bender, Papagiannis and the like is still possible, but it’s much more difficult for the average person. The people who specialize in that area for teams are often committed to it as a full-time exercise, but the executives making decisions simply can’t commit equal time to seeing top prospects overseas. The multi-day trips to Turkey or China or Serbia are a severe time-commitment for execs who could be seeing multiple top prospects face off in a power conference showdown, all without having to take a single flight.

The mystery factor will never be expunged from amateur drafts regardless of how you tweak the age limit. If it’s not international players reaping the benefits, it’s NCAA players with raw talent and tools automatically being associated with “upside”. A good base to start from can certainly provide hope for a player’s chance to improve, but many teams suffer the consequences later because they’re content to ignore their top picks not actually being that good at basketball.

Basketball is a sport fueled by ego, a fact which can’t be legislated out of the game. Just as a player is empowered by his belief that he is the best player on the court and capable of beating any defender one-on-one, a GM and his co-conspirators must believe they can extract the most out of players whose destinies are uncertain. This would remain the same regardless of how long you artificially forced players to stay out of the NBA; increasing the age limit would not fundamentally change the risk-taking philosophies for owners and decision-makers around the league. Some teams will always err on the side of caution, others will straddle the line between confidence and arrogance in order to chase greatness.

This isn’t even my least-favorite part of the argument posed. That bit comes toward the end, regarding the players’ side (bold emphasis mine):

"I totally agree with the argument that you have the right to make a living, I just don’t think you have the right to make a living that pays you tens of millions of dollars before you are worth that salary. You don’t have to go to college and play for free, go play in the D-League, go to Europe, go play wherever you want to develop your game so you can earn your spot with the big boys."

This might just be a phrasing issue, but the suggestion that someone should not have “the right” to earn what the market dictates they are worth is lunacy. The draft is already an inherently anti-labor exercise where employees have no say in who they are employed by or how much they are worth; these decisions are made by the NBA’s lottery system and a collective bargaining agreement made by veterans who no longer have a stake in what’s fair and good for rookies. To position the rights of entry-level players as the issue is to ignore the systemic clusterfuck that is the amateur draft.

NBA owners have done everything they can to artificially legislate the risk out of decision-making. The concept of the max contract is tied to the same inherent thought that drives the NBA to push for an age-limit — their goal isn’t to improve the league, but to deaden the impact of colossal screw-ups made by their general managers, to reduce the risk of every individual action a team can take. This has ensured minimal free-agency movement of impact players, instead forcing teams to risk inflated deals on sub-star players, hoping they can be the lucky team to pluck the diamond out of the rough.

If teams are unwilling to take a risk on 18 and 19-year-old kids, they should be content to watch them tumble through the draft to whatever team is bold enough to select them. But that doesn’t happen. A GM’s worst fear is not missing on a known quantity, it is passing up on the “extreme upside” player shrouded in mystery and watching that player bloom into a superstar. You can survive passing on the fourth-year senior nearing the apex of his potential, but GMs lose their jobs over passing on guys like Giannis Antetokounmpo. The call to raise the age limit to protect from these missteps passes the buck to players — already pawns in a exploitative system — instead of GMs who made incorrect decisions.

Conveniently, complaints over one-and-done were few and far between last year when a Duke team powered by three freshman — two of whom went in the top-10 of the 2015 Draft — won the National Title, and a Kentucky team anchored by future No. 1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns nearly ran the table. This reveals posturing over the age-limit as what it is — veiled disappointment over the discrepancy in talent for NBA Draft classes.

No matter how long you force kids to stay in school (or in Europe), players and their draft classes will vary in talent level. Two years in college didn’t bring Joe Smith anywhere close to the career success of Kevin Garnett, an extra year of college didn’t make Glenn Robinson a better NBA player than Jason Kidd, and Hasheem Thabeet’s third year at UConn certainly didn’t propel him past Stephen Curry or James Harden.

Barricading entry to the league further will never change how difficult it is to predict the trajectory of young basketball players, nor will it change the inherent risk GMs and owners are willing to assume. Every weak draft class is not proof the age limit needs raising, and perhaps we should hold middle-aged executives who are supposed to know better to a higher standard than teenagers looking to begin their careers.