Is the NBA’s One-and-Done Rule Flawed?
November 9, 2011
This is what you get when you draft college freshmen.
The National Basketball Association has instituted a rule that requires its players to attend college for a year or be a year removed from their high school graduation in order to be eligible for its annual draft at the conclusion of every basketball season. The rule was put into place to protect players from entering the draft too early and ruining their professional careers, and to protect general managers from drafting athletes that are too immature to handle the pressures of becoming an overnight celebrity who is playing longer games in different cities every night. In theory, it could help both the NBA franchises and the players by taking pressure of general managers to find the next Kobe Bryant, and allowing basketball players to mature a little more before making their favorite hobby their new profession.
But, there are three major flaws in the one-and-done rule. One, general managers are making the same mistakes even though the highly-touted players are getting another year of basketball at a higher level. Two, there is no real difference in most players after one year of college, or more realistically one semester. Three, it only significantly affects one group of people.
The one-and-done rule does not shield general managers from picking players that will impact their teams, because most NBA general managers are inept at their jobs. Only a few franchises consistently collect players that significantly aide their teams. The Los Angeles Lakers, the Portland Trailblazers, and the San Antonio Spurs consistently get the best talent in the draft. The Houston Rockets, the Chicago Bulls, and the Atlanta Hawks draft unconventionally, but their rosters are always full of solid players. Almost every other team in the NBA draft poorly. With very exceptions, the players that dominate the National Basketball Association came straight from high school. Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, and many other straight to the pros players ruled basketball over the last decade. A study by a Harvard student actually proved that the best players in the NBA have been prep-to-pros players, so they cannot be completely at fault. The onus is not with them. The rule was created to solve a problem in the draft that lies with the player, but the problem does not lie with the player. It lies with the management team and its decisions.
There are very specific problems that do lie with the player though. The problem with prospective NBA athletes is that, though they are getting progressively bigger, stronger, and faster, they are also becoming increasingly less skilled. A casual fan would probably stand dumbfounded if asked to name five pure shooters in the league today. Today’s players seldom learn the fundamentals of the game before practicing crossovers and dunks. Hence, the quality of the game of basketball being played at the lower levels is exponentially worse now than it has been in thirty years, despite the athletes being better than ever. The addition of the one-and-done rule has also had a few unintended consequences. It has decimated the game of college basketball. In years past at the college level, some of the more physically talented players have had to wait to get on the court because their fundamentals and their understanding of the game were not up to par with more established players. Both John Wooden and Dean Smith were notorious for benching freshmen, but they were also well-respected for making their players better basketball players and men. Today’s programs like the University of Kentucky regularly boast line-ups littered with the best freshmen in the nation, but rarely improve their skill sets. The proliferation of college kids joining and leaving teams decimates college basketball. It puts less skilled athletes in important roles, because they have more natural ability. College teams now have less chemistry, their plays have less continuity, and coaches lose credibility because they have to woo and coddle the more talented freshman rather than building their programs. The one-and-done rule is just giving immature players a bigger stage to confuse scouts.
Finally, the one-and-done rule is also inherently biased against one group of people. It has been called racist, but that term is harsh and presumes that the NBA suppressed access to the league on the basis of outright prejudice. David Stern and the powers that be (the man) never crowded into a small, secluded room hidden away from society and decided to screw young Black athletes out of millions of dollars. No, owners wanted a viable option for giving millions of dollars to young athletes that could not give them quick returns on their investments (the exorbitant salaries). Granted, treating a man’s physical ability to work as an investment sounds eerily fairly similar to slavery, but in the NBA, the players get a big payoff too. They get paid more money than they could imagine to play the sport that they would play for free. That is not the exact model of racism. However, the one-and-done rule only affects black men (the only athletes other Robert Swift that are regularly drafted), so there is a fundamental bias.
The one-and-done rule is flawed. Regardless of the provisions made by the governing body of the National Basketball Association, the draft is plagued by various separate obstacles. The general managers invariably choose player incorrectly, it hurts the game of basketball by offering an ever-declining version of the sport, and it only affects one group of men. If a better substitute for the one-and-done rule is not found soon, the NBA may lose its hold on the market and ultimately itself.