You're utterly daft. For the record, here is an ESPN article regarding the one and done rule:
http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/16237629/ten-years-nba-one-done-rule-no-less-controversial
NBA: A rule designed to protect owners from themselves
By Pablo S. Torre
Two years into retirement, behind the closed doors of a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., the greatest player of all time warned his competitors about teenagers.
It was All-Star weekend, a time when then-NBA commissioner David Stern liked to assemble owners, team executives and union leaders under the guise of labor-management diplomacy.
Michael Jordan, who was both part-owner of the Wizards and its president of basketball operations, spoke up in support of the issue Stern would call "a personal project of mine."
Yes, a 19-year-old Kevin Garnett had skipped college, warranting a lottery pick in 1995, opening the gates for Kobe Bryant the next year and Tracy McGrady the year after that. But with a growing gallery of perceived busts -- from
Korleone Young (1998) to
Jonathan Bender (1999) to
Darius Miles (2000) -- Stern and the owners, Jordan included, advocated for a rule change to stem the tide.
Never mind that the pipeline from high school to the NBA would soon deliver LeBron James. In the ballroom, Jordan lamented what he saw as the league's sinking standard of professionalism. Fellow attendees recall him explaining that these high schoolers were too unpredictable to scout, badly needed to learn fundamentals, even that they threatened disaster, both on and off the court.
Of course, less than five months later, Washington found itself in possession of the No. 1 pick in the 2001 NBA draft. And Jordan could not help but select ... out of Glynn Academy in Brunswick, Georgia ...
Kwame Brown.
"Poor Michael," Stern would say years later of the Brown pick in the book "Boys Among Men." "That's the system we had."
No longer. In June 2005, as one of the final alterations to the NBA and NBPA's renegotiated collective bargaining agreement, Stern's personal project became systemic change. The revised text of Article X, Section I of the CBA mandated that draft prospects be at least 19 years old and a year removed from high school, thus producing the one-and-done feeder system. Welcome to the University of Texas,
Kevin Durant.
But most of all? The new rule sought to protect owners and talent evaluators like Poor Michael from their biggest fear.
Themselves.
LOOK BACK AT the league's campaign for one-and-done, and you'll find rhetoric that has been conspicuously phased out over the last decade. In May 2005, months before instituting a mandatory dress code, and months after the seismic "Malice in the Palace" brawl in Detroit, the eternally image-conscious Stern told the Boston Globe that "it is time to tell the communities that we serve that the sixth-grader, as Arthur Ashe used to say, is far more likely to be a rocket scientist, biology professor, etc., than a pro athlete."
Stern and his successor, Adam Silver, have since stopped arguing that letting John Calipari borrow
Karl-Anthony Towns for 39 games will inspire the next Neil deGrasse Tyson. The real argument for an age limit is instead rooted in economic self-preservation.
It's basic math. Unlike football, baseball and soccer, basketball is a five-on-five game wherein one star player can singlehandedly elevate a billion-dollar franchise or one costly underachiever can entomb it. "Nothing in sports is more valuable than an NBA first-round pick," one league source points out. And the bigger a prospect's résumé, and the better his competition, the easier it should be for teams to avoid investing millions into a bust.
"It has been our sense for a long time that our draft would be more competitive if our teams had an opportunity to see these players play an additional year," Silver told USA Today. "We believe the additional year of maturity would be meaningful." And if that maturity just so happens to coincide with the brand-building exposure of a nationally televised college tournament, even better.
Many players object to this logic on principle, naturally. Union leaders have long observed how absurd it is that 18-year-olds can die in Afghanistan or fly a helicopter or buy a gun but not draw an NBA paycheck. "I started working when I was 13 in New York," NBPA executive director Michele Roberts told ESPN in 2014. "I've never not worked. I understand that you want to work to support yourself and your family. It offends me that there should be some artificial limits set on someone's ability to make a living."
But this ethical concern is far from a legitimate threat to Article X, Section I. It is, in fact, the opposite.
WITH BOTH SIDES able to opt out of the current CBA this December, one-and-done's biggest political problem is simple. In the minds of its boosters, a yearlong delay isn't nearly lengthy enough.
College administrators -- who compete every year to live at the mercy of a transitory teenager -- complain to Silver that the current rule is "a disaster," upending the continuity of a coach-driven sport. NBA owners, meanwhile, want prospects with even more comprehensive résumés, further reducing the risk that they, like Jordan, will find themselves unable to pass on Kwame Brown.
Funny, I can't find anything about the NCAA wanting this but I see lots of reasons the NBA wanted it. If you'd like, we can talk about the economics of college sports, the need for money making sports to help support the other sports and the relative few universities that actually are in the black from sports. Since you're so big on talking about economics.
