A new kind of ball game

Jalen Brown

As the NBA desperately tries to save its season, whether by Magic Kingdom or MGM, they’re making some major, longterm moves within the current crisis. There’s the massive tech deal with Microsoft, intended to reform League Pass and create a new sports betting culture.


 Perhaps the more revolutionary development, though, is the NBA’s professional pathway program, a G League initiative that gives elite prospects six-figure contracts, in addition to providing them a development program. Top high school prospect Jalen Green announced his G League commitment on April 16, setting a trend. After the announcement, elite prospects Isaiah Todd and Daishen Nix followed suit and joined the professional pathway. This is a new trend, one that threatens NCAA basketball, which is now feverishly reforming itself to keep up.
While some in the media have cheered the trend, others, with a more traditional perspective, spoke out against it. I have some sympathy for arguments that the NBA has sometimes rejected tradition at its peril. It appears, for example, that increased player movement has turned a lot of people off, regardless of how many times fans are lectured about how wonderful it is that today’s players so freely seek their own bliss. In this case, however, I believe the upholders of tradition are in the wrong, and not just because the NCAA rules are a moral blight. The NBA had to do this or something like it, for the good of the sport and health of its business.
First, this was a necessary maneuver to outflank Australia’s NBL, whose similar program allowed it to host top prospects LaMelo Ball and RJ Hampton this past season. Both players appeared to do fine reputation-wise for their Australia adventure, which meant that many more might have eschewed college ball for the NBL route this year. The NBA didn’t see the point in allowing young players to draw fans and viewers to a league across the world when it had the power to keep all these prospects in-house.

Second, and I believe this often gets misunderstood, the NBA’s relationship with the NCAA isn’t mutually beneficial. The NCAA is often referred to as a “free farm system” for the NBA. In one sense, yes, the NBA doesn’t literally pay the NCAA’s players. In another sense, the NCAA farm system is quite costly. College football has a nice deal with the NFL, where the former’s games are on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and the latter’s games are mostly on Sundays, so the two leagues don’t overlap. The NBA has no such deal with the NCAA. Prime-time college basketball games often run concurrently with prime-time NBA games. When March Madness happens, it overshadows everything in the NBA universe. So this is not a “free” farm system as much as it is a competing business, one that seeks eyeballs and ticket revenue at the NBA’s expense. In theory, it’s a business’ prerogative to crush a competitor, not sustain it with ceded talent.

The counter-argument, long advocated by those who wish for a copacetic arrangement between college and pro ball, is that the NCAA games help brand the stars of tomorrow. While it’s theoretically possible that the NBA draws some benefit from these players getting famous in college, it’s not like Kemba Walker’s massive collegiate stardom at Connecticut helped the NBA when Walker played professionally in Charlotte. Anthony Davis went from college basketball’s most famous freshman to relative anonymity as an elite player in New Orleans. You can cite Steph Curry and Carmelo Anthony as guys whose fame was augmented by college ball, but it’s also possible that these players would have eventually achieved the same level of fame regardless. In Steph’s case, yes, the legend started at Davidson, but being the greatest shooter ever, a two-time MVP and three-time champion probably accounts for 99 percent of his current renown.

The most persuasive example for the NCAA is probably the most recent one. I cannot deny that Zion Williamson’s Pelicans games draw more interest because of what he did at Duke. Why this is true of him as opposed to, say, early-career Kyrie Irving, speaks to the odd alchemy that is athletic celebrity. Zion is a unique force and people started to notice that when he was playing for college basketball’s most famous program.
At the same time, it’s not where you start in the NBA, it’s where you end up. Kobe Bryant didn’t need college basketball branding to become a megastar. Neither did LeBron James. NBA superstardom isn’t forged in March. It comes from what happens in May and June. It’s questionable as to whether the minor early-career bump of college basketball branding is worth all that the NBA loses from helping to sustain a competing league.

The pro level isn’t just sacrificing eyeballs to the NCAA either. The fact that the two leagues use different rules has major implications for pro development. The cleave between the NBA (24-second shot clock, maximum 3-point line distance of 23 feet, 9 inches) and college (30-second shot clock, maximum 3-point line distance of 20 feet, 9 inches), isn’t just some minor detail. A game’s rules are defining, and practicing for one set of rules means unlearning habits when you must succeed with another set. This difference between leagues almost certainly messes with the pro development of players.

Nix

Increasingly, I hear from NBA scouts that they prefer players out of Europe going forward, because the games are similar to the NBA style of play. NBA coaches have been pilfering European tactics. Or, to put it more generously, Jazz coach Quin Snyder hosts a yearly Las Vegas symposium, where European coaches teach NBA coaches and vice versa. Through this cultural exchange, NBA and Euro styles are merging, as the NCAA game putters on, locked into an older era. 

 It used to be that Euro prospects carried this scary aura of mystery versus the tried-and-true NCAA guys. Now, with the great NBA/Euro convergence, that dynamic is getting flipped.
To summarize, the NCAA game competes with the NBA game for relevance and temporarily locks future NBA players into a style of play they’ll have to later unlearn. Since this less-than-beneficial dynamic is fairly obvious, you might have expected NBA owners to have long ago tried NCAA-undermining measures.
  That they didn’t might speak to how many owners have considerations beyond pure profit and business sense. Quite a few of these power brokers are megadonors to their alma maters. This older, richer cohort fits right smack dab in the college ball fan demographic. And, yes, they wear their school’s sweater and cheer like crazy during March. To help the NBA’s future in a time of global crisis though, these owners might have to hurt something close to their hearts. You can thank Australia’s NBL for forcing them to finally make the right choice.
 No matter what happens, the NCCA was too slow and too greedy and the NBA swooped in and grabbed the opprortunity.

Swish !