Draft 2006: A Look Back at Ten Years of Teenagers
Kevin Garnett was not supposed to be the kid that changed the game. Clearly, 1995 wasn't going to be the year a player made the leap from prep to the pros. If the much-hyped Felipe Lopez opted for college the year before, who was Garnett to think he didn't need to head to Michigan? Besides, sports reporters across the nation were already setting up Schea Cotton, one year behind KG, as The One.
Funny how things work out. While KG declared for the draft and has become one of the premiere players in the NBA, fellow prodigies Lopez and Cotton flamed out in college. Cotton never really made it to the NBA while Lopez struggled to hang on as a journeyman. Regardless of who changed the game, the fact remained that the era between 1995 and 2005 will always be known as the Decade of The Prodigy. David Stern put the kibosh on the straight-from-high-school crowd by adding an age limit in the latest collective bargaining agreement and while supporters like to point out that the move will help high schoolers, will it really? How much did coming out early hurt the young players? The simple answer is that it didn't. Unscrupulous agents were able to convince a few players like Korleone Young and Ousmanne Cisse that their stock was much higher than it truly was but the bottom line is that high schoolers picked in the first round were as, if not more, successful than their collegiate counterparts. (And let's be honest, neither Cisse or Young, undersized PF's really had much of a shot at making the league, college or no college.) While people like to point at the disappointing 2001 class as a sign of too young, too soon, it should be pointed out that seven collegians from the first round of that draft are already out of the league. In the ten years of high schoolers, only one is currently not in the NBA or NBDL: the troubled Leon Smith. True, Kwame, Curry, Chandler, Diop might not be franchise players but are they worse off than their classmates from the 2001 McDonalds All-American game: Carlos Hurt, Chris Thomas, Maurice Williams, Rashaad Carruth, Dajuan Wagner, Julius Hodge, Anthony Richardson, James White, David Harrison, Terrance Ford, Aaron Miles, Cedric Bozeman, Daniel Ewing, Kelvin Torbert, Josh Childress, Jawad Williams, David Lee, Rick Rickert, Wayne Simien. In 2001, David Stern weighed in on the high school movement and gave a very telling quote:
Another issue is the fact that high schoolers will be able to sign at least two full max contracts in their career and could manage to sign three. Paul Pierce entered the league after three years at Kansas. He is looking to extend his contract and already people are questioning how much he should really get since he will be 30 or 31 when that contract (his second max deal) will start. Compare that to Kobe who will be 32 when his second max contract ends. A study showed that forcing someone like Lebron James to go to college for two years could cost him upwards of 100 million dollars. God forbid he get injured while in college ala Randy Livingston, a top prospect that blew out both of his knees at LSU. While it saves the NBA money, to tell someone like Lebron that he has to play for free in the NCAA's or play for peanuts in the NBDL (which has a lower age limit) is patently unfair. As for this draft, nothing has been improved. The draft pool is light at the top. The best "can't miss" prospect is heading to Ohio State and none of the collegiate prospects look like guys who can step and make a major difference next season, be it freshman Ty Thomas, sophomores LaMarcus Aldridge and Rudy Gay, junior Adam Morrison or even seniors Brandon Roy or Rodney Carney. There are still prospects skating by on potential ala Rajon Rondo, Cedric Simmons, and Patrick O'Bryant. But don't worry, the "business of the NBA" is better off today then it was yesterday.
Funny how things work out. While KG declared for the draft and has become one of the premiere players in the NBA, fellow prodigies Lopez and Cotton flamed out in college. Cotton never really made it to the NBA while Lopez struggled to hang on as a journeyman. Regardless of who changed the game, the fact remained that the era between 1995 and 2005 will always be known as the Decade of The Prodigy. David Stern put the kibosh on the straight-from-high-school crowd by adding an age limit in the latest collective bargaining agreement and while supporters like to point out that the move will help high schoolers, will it really? How much did coming out early hurt the young players? The simple answer is that it didn't. Unscrupulous agents were able to convince a few players like Korleone Young and Ousmanne Cisse that their stock was much higher than it truly was but the bottom line is that high schoolers picked in the first round were as, if not more, successful than their collegiate counterparts. (And let's be honest, neither Cisse or Young, undersized PF's really had much of a shot at making the league, college or no college.) While people like to point at the disappointing 2001 class as a sign of too young, too soon, it should be pointed out that seven collegians from the first round of that draft are already out of the league. In the ten years of high schoolers, only one is currently not in the NBA or NBDL: the troubled Leon Smith. True, Kwame, Curry, Chandler, Diop might not be franchise players but are they worse off than their classmates from the 2001 McDonalds All-American game: Carlos Hurt, Chris Thomas, Maurice Williams, Rashaad Carruth, Dajuan Wagner, Julius Hodge, Anthony Richardson, James White, David Harrison, Terrance Ford, Aaron Miles, Cedric Bozeman, Daniel Ewing, Kelvin Torbert, Josh Childress, Jawad Williams, David Lee, Rick Rickert, Wayne Simien. In 2001, David Stern weighed in on the high school movement and gave a very telling quote:
"I believe that kids are now bouncing the ball in school yards saying, 'Just get to be 17 and that's where I'm going,'" Stern said. "The result of that is bad policy. It's bad for the kid's development, bad for the college game, bad for the business of the NBA."As I've said before, "bad for the kid's development" is pure propaganda. If anything, NBA teams are more interested in a kid's long term development than colleges. NBA teams are hoping to draft someone who will be with them for a career while colleges are only interested in winning games in the next four years. Gerald Wallace had to leave Alabama because he knew that his NBA position was SF but his coach Mark Gottfriend wanted him to fill the team's need a PF. Instead of playing out of position for three more years or transferring (and having to sit out a year and then hoping his new coach won't recruit a SF and try to move him to PF again), Wallace left after one year and has become a great young prospect and one of the better defensive players in the NBA. College thinks about the program while NBA develops programs to help the kids. Because of limited practice time in NCAA's, the NBA is a much better place to develop. How many colleges can hire Clifford Ray or monitor offseason workouts for their young big men? Now "bad for the college game" is 100% true. The better talent, the better the college game. The one thing it will change is the wide-open NCAA tournament climate that has prevailed the last few years. The better prospects will go to the better schools strengthening the powerhouses and likely making opening weekend upsets a little more scarce. Personally, I feel like it's somewhat unfair to force kids to play for "free" in the NCAA's, an organization that even limits the part-time work that players can take part in. For many players, like Memphis' Shawne Williams, this simply isn't an option. For these hardship players, the NBA is just delaying the inevitable. Williams is entering the NBA this year, even though he didn't exactly wow scouts with his play this season, because he needs to support his family and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to pass up a chance at guaranteed contract worth millions, especially when there's no guarantees that the same contract will be waiting for him if he stays in school. There are as many players who stayed in college too long as there are those that came out too early. It should be very interesting to see if more players follow his lead. Will players now stay in college longer or will the kids who were coming out of high school just come out after their freshman year? How long the Class of '06 stays in school? While only three freshman entered this years draft, that could be attributed to the great Age Limit exodus to the draft of the last year's high school seniors. Will guys like Durant, Oden, Wright, and Young stay in school or will this move just increase the amount of one-and-done's in the draft? In the end, it's all about money. Notice that in Stern's quote, he didn't say that the high schoolers were bad for the NBA. He couldn't. He knows that he can't really argue that KG, Kobe, T-Mac, Jermaine O'Neal, Amare and Lebron are bad for the NBA. He said it was bad for "the business of the NBA". This is 100% true, the NBA was having to pay money for potential and developing players . Rather than having the NCAA take care of the development, the NBA now has to foot the bill for their young players. A player like DeSagana Diop or Kendrick Perkins took/will likely take their entire rookie deals to become players and even then, there's really no telling how good they'll finally end up. This is how guys like Jonathon Bender and Darius Miles end up getting big money contracts even though they haven't really shown anything on the court. Instead of trying to decide whether or not to draft these players, NBA teams were forced to decide how much they'd be willing to pay to keep them around. In the NBA pre-KG, freshman and sophomores usually only came out if they had proved that they were ready for the game. While the NBA would love to get back to those days, the fact is that the draft is a game of potential now. And if anyone is to blame for that, it is the NBA for expanding the league so that rosters are so thin that it almost seems like a waste not to hold a spot or two for a young project.
Another issue is the fact that high schoolers will be able to sign at least two full max contracts in their career and could manage to sign three. Paul Pierce entered the league after three years at Kansas. He is looking to extend his contract and already people are questioning how much he should really get since he will be 30 or 31 when that contract (his second max deal) will start. Compare that to Kobe who will be 32 when his second max contract ends. A study showed that forcing someone like Lebron James to go to college for two years could cost him upwards of 100 million dollars. God forbid he get injured while in college ala Randy Livingston, a top prospect that blew out both of his knees at LSU. While it saves the NBA money, to tell someone like Lebron that he has to play for free in the NCAA's or play for peanuts in the NBDL (which has a lower age limit) is patently unfair. As for this draft, nothing has been improved. The draft pool is light at the top. The best "can't miss" prospect is heading to Ohio State and none of the collegiate prospects look like guys who can step and make a major difference next season, be it freshman Ty Thomas, sophomores LaMarcus Aldridge and Rudy Gay, junior Adam Morrison or even seniors Brandon Roy or Rodney Carney. There are still prospects skating by on potential ala Rajon Rondo, Cedric Simmons, and Patrick O'Bryant. But don't worry, the "business of the NBA" is better off today then it was yesterday.
