NBA touts a flawed system

By BOB LIPPER
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
Published: June 27, 2008

The NBA draft was held in Madison Square Garden’s day-care center Thursday night, with milk and cookies for all the diaper dandies and with David Stern on hand to give each of the kids a handshake and a copy of “Goodnight Moon.“
Brandon Jennings coulda, woulda, shoulda been there except for one technicality.
Stern’s cartel barred him from the festivities.
It’s not that Jennings did anything wrong. It’s that he’s 18, just finished high school at Virginia’s Oak Hill Academy and therefore is a birthday shy of being eligible for the draft.
Per an NBA rule adopted in 2006, he has to go to college for one year—or hang around his home near Los Angeles for a year or get a job at Disneyland for a year—before he’s able to be drafted by, say, the Timberwolves and begin making serious coin.
Accordingly, Jennings signed last fall with Arizona.
Except now, he’s considering a different route, one no indentured freshman-to-be has yet taken.
Jennings says he might spin dribble around college, play pro ball in Europe for a year and then submit his name for the draft. Yes, he’s had difficulties with the college entrance exam and was awaiting his latest result to see if he’d qualify to suit up at Arizona next season. But even if he makes the grade, he says he still might go overseas rather than yawn through English 101 and check out the library water fountains.
All of which should be applauded.
Look, I’m not rooting for Jennings to stiff Arizona. I’m just rooting for him to do what’s best for Brandon Jennings and not what’s dictated by the NBA and its players union and accepted by the NCAA in the name of TV dollars and March drawsheets. If he wants to spend a year in Tucson, fine. If he wants to take his game to Italy or Spain, that’s cool, too.
The basic fact here is the NBA rule stinks. It makes a sham of higher education and makes college a pit stop for guys with 36-inch verticals who should be allowed to jump directly from high school to the NBA if they’re good enough and it’s what they wish to do.
Instead, they’re steered to Howlands and Boeheims for tutoring in fundamentals and to registration for two semesters worth (maybe) of studying. Upwards of a dozen one-and-done freshmen figured to be plucked in Thursday night’s first round. You think all of them took seriously the academic component of their college experience? Not likely.
That didn’t make Derrick Rose or J.J. Hickson an imposter, mind you. They were just pawns in the game—one that allows the NBA to avoid bottle-feeding schoolboys it then gets a year later when their talent has been enhanced by layers of maturity and marketability.
Most, if not all, the one-and-done crowd would’ve preferred to leap directly from the prom to the draft and spend not a day on a college campus. But they felt they had no choice.
Now comes Jennings to offer a Plan B option for future hotshots. He’s a whiz-bang playmaker who dropped 40 points on Benedictine last December at the Robins Center and a week later torched Greensboro (N.C.) Dudley for 49 at Arizona’s McKale Center.
That game was supposed to be a preview for 2008-09. What it might’ve been was a tease. Don’t blame Jennings, though. Blame a lousy system. He’s just exercising freedom of choice. It’s an American right the NBA can’t entirely govern.