Anthony Davis: What's his ceiling?

Big difference between this:

And this:

That's a list of draftees. What about all the players who put in for the draft straight out of high school, and had no chance?

 

The chances of them making the NBA were zero percent.

The chances of them receiving a college education and a degree were slightly more than zero percent. But ever so slightly. Unless they played for Calipari or Bob Huggins. Then we're back to zero percent.

 

The concern about college kids and whether they need to play in front of the Cameron Crazies to understand pressure — while touching – also ignores the international aspect of the game. Rubio played in the Euroleague at 16. Dirk was 16 and playing with a top German team. Tony Parker was 17 when he first played with a Paris pro team.

Why's it okay for these guys to avoid college but we insist American players get their one year of service?

 

Interesting that the sidebar here seems to be that so few players receive really good technical coaching at any level. It's mostly sink or swim. Maybe that's why so many arrive in the NBA with holes in their games.

Or at least they have holes in their games according to the grumpy conventional wisdom of the sporting press.

Another question: Do big men need more and more technical instruction than the little fellers?

 

Simple, so Mizzou and Devil can be entertained by kids playing for free.

 

The simplest thing they could do would be to follow the NFL lead and create a Draft Advisory Board with some teeth and some credibility. In the NFL that group gives good, honest feedback that has become respected over time, so a guy like Montee Ball at Wisconsin can trust them when they say he'd be a third-round pick at best, and he can make a good decision to go back to school. But it all relies on the board also being willing to say "yes, you are going to be a high first-round pick and you should come out."

I don't know if the NCAA is willing to live with that kind of honesty for basketball. And anyway the NBA is so overrun by agents and assorted hangers-on that a board would have a hard time delivering a well-received message to the kid. If Worldwide Wes says it's all good, the player is going to base his decision on that.

 

What are you suggesting that all college sports be abolished?

Whatever the NFL is doing is working and the NBA is working better now that teams can watch a player in college for a year rather than debate the potential upside of Kwame Brown or Desagana Diop.

If they don't want to play in college for a year or two, they can do what Brandon Jennings did.

 

How do you come to the conclusion that I want college sports abolished?

 

Hunh? A free public education is a right? When? Where? How did I miss that?
No one on here would tolerate an industry dictating, to them, arbitrary brightlines (can't play until you are 20, etc.) Football is different because they can plausibly argue (and have successfully done so) that a 19 year old kid would get physically injured in the NFL. Provably not true in the NBA.

 

Wrong. Not when the owners collude together. They cannot act as a monopoly any more than every car company could decide together to not hire anyone under 25 or over 50. Can an individual team decide to favor experienced players? Yes. Can the entire industry act as a monopoly? No.

 

But it's the perfect rule for the NBA in that sense because it's long enough that they get all the free marketing of the NCAA tournament but not so long that any Curt Flood-type is going to bother sticking his neck out and, to live the proverb, make a federal case out of it. The case wouldn't even reach court by the time he entered next year's draft anyway.

At two years? Maybe they do see a court challenge.