5-star recruit Darius Bazley de-commits from Syracuse to take G-League path
Darius Bazley was on track to be a one and done at Syracuse, but he’s foregoing college basketball to go a different path to the NBA.
Darius Bazley is a five-star recruit out of Cincinnati, Ohio, and he had committed to Syracuse in the Class of 2018. If things were to go according to a typical plan, he would surely be a one-and-done in college before heading to the NBA. But Bazley has a different idea, telling Shams Charania of Yahoo! Sports he has de-committed from Syracuse and will instead go to the G-League.
There have been others that found a way around one year of college before going to the NBA. Brandon Jennings and more recently Terrance Ferguson played in Europe for a year before being draft-eligible, and Thon Maker played at a prep school in Canada for an extra year before being draft-eligible himself.
But Bazley would be the first to go from high school to the G-League, and he realizes he could start a trend:
"I’m aware that this might start a trend and that’s one of the reasons why I am doing this. I’m outspoken and I like to speak on things. This is me speaking through my actions, speaking through my character. This is going to happen down the road and become more common. But someone has to start the fire — and I believe I’m going to do that, and it’s very important to me."
Playing overseas has built-in difficulties, at least initially. Simply living in a foreign country is an adjustment, with or without a language barrier, so doing it for a year may not be worth it for a lot of prospects coming out of high school. But there is nice money that can be made playing professional basketball overseas, even for a single year, whereas G-League players who aren’t on a two-way deal make between $19,500 and $26,000.
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If he has success skipping college entirely to go through the G-League on his way to the NBA, Bazley will be looked back on as a trailblazer. But if college basketball is essentially Triple-A to the NBA’s major league level, with exposure Bazley would get playing for Jim Boeheim in the ACC, the G-League is still something less than that right now.