Money: sports and teenagers
About 10 days ago I was talking to E. J. Maguire, the Director of the National Hockey League's Central Scouting, in a Montreal hotel lobby about the science of drafting 18-year-olds when he said that he watched the National Basketball Association Draft where there is a 19-year-old age minimum to enter the league and that the NHL will never go back to drafting 20-year-olds as the league did more than three decades ago.
The NHL has decided to follow United States Antitrust laws and let 18-year-olds join their player-employment pool.
The NHL wasn't even part of the lawsuit brought by Ken Linseman against the World Hockey Association in 1977. Linseman had signed a contract with the Birmingham Bulls owner John Bassett before his 20th birthday which was against WHA rules. Linseman challenged the WHA rule under the Sherman Act claiming that he was denied employment and that the WHA's rule was an illegal restraint of trade. A United States District Court in Connecticut agreed with Linseman based on the Spencer Haywood lawsuit against the National Basketball Association in 1971.
Haywood, who was a star on the 1968 United States Olympic Gold Medal Basketball Team in Mexico City, decided to skip his final two seasons as a player at the University of Detroit and signed on with the American Basketball Association's Denver Rockets for the 1969-70. On December 30, 1970 Haywood signed a contract with the Seattle SuperSonics as a free agent but the NBA blocked him from joining the team because he did not meet the NBA's rule of being out of high school for four years.
Haywood sued and in March 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 7 to 2 in his favor and that the NBA rule which required a player to complete four years of college eligibility was illegal. The NBA has struggled with players declaring their interest in joining the NBA for 38 years. The NBA then allowed players into the league without the four years of college through something called the "Hardship Rule" which required qualified players to prove that there was family financial distress and hardship and that the player needed to turn pro early to help support his family.
The NBA lost a good many great talents to the rival ABA like Julius Erving, George Gervin and Moses Malone because there were no strings attached to ABA deals. Malone entered the ABA straight out of high school.
The NBA finally started signing high school talent in 1975 with Bill Willoughby and Darryl Dawkins. The ABA and ABA eligibility rules vanished in June 1976 when the NBA “expanded” by four teams as four ABA franchises left behind the old league and joined the established league. With the competition for signing talent between the two leagues a thing of the past, there probably was no need to take unproven high school kids and twenty years passed before the NBA thought about high school players again. Kevin Garnett was taken by Minnesota with the fifth pick in the 1995 draft and that opened the door to others, some really good talents like Kobe Bryant and a good many washouts. The washouts cost NBA owners a lot of money and NBA apologists, sportswriters, began to worry about the kids that didn’t make it and how they squandered their opportunities to make millions of dollars. The sportswriters also began to worry about the quality of college basketball crumbling as the most talented skipped school and classrooms to go pro. Money makes the world go round.
Brandon Jennings decided to circumvent the NBA's one year old of high school and you can apply for work in the league by playing in Italy instead of college in 2008-09. The NBA would like to develop players for free and college basketball provides a great place for research and development as owners don't have to shell out millions while a player hones his skill.
It is all about money.
The older and more experienced a player, the better read a scout gets on the player. Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League provide players and organizations with options. The NBA doesn't.
The National Hockey League and Major League Baseball draft 18-year-olds as part of the way they hire players but they do give 18-year-old choices. In Major League Baseball, a United States, Canadian or Puerto Rican high school graduate can sign with the team that drafts him or end up in college and play baseball for some school for three years before they are eligible to be drafted again. There are also other loopholes in the Major League Baseball Draft, if a high school player decides not to sign with a team and play in one of the independent baseball leagues which do not fall under the rules and regulations of Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball, that player is eligible to be drafted the follow year. Additionally Division III United States college and university players and junior and community college players can be selected at any time.
The National Hockey League drafts globally, players are eligible at the age of 18 and have a number of choices. They could sign with the team that drafts them, wait for up to two years if they play junior hockey in Canada and in the United States or in Europe to sign and if they don't they go back into the draft pool or go to college where they can stay for as many as four years and then sign a contract.
The system seems to work well for baseball and hockey although the entire idea of a draft is pretty much illegal under United States antitrust laws. The sports leagues and the players association cut deals through collective bargaining that allows the drafts to take place. The National Basketball Association and the National Basketball Players Association have a deal in place that allows the league to set an age minimum for entry into the league, actually it is not an age minimum per se, the NBA wants a player to have one year between high school graduation and entry into the draft.
The reason is strictly economical for the NBA owners. With the exception of Lebron James or Kobe Bryant, most 18-year-olds are not ready to be prime time players and make millions of dollars sitting on the bench. The NBA can get a more complete employee with a player who has played 30 or more games of college ball in his freshman season along with probably 70 or 80 practices.
No one is challenging NBA Commissioner David Stern who pushed for the one year out of high school rule. In a perfect rule Stern would like to see a 20-year-old age minimum entry rule. You can't blame Stern who is looking after league economics and the players association really doesn't want too many 18 or 19 year olds taking veteran's jobs, which is why, the latest deal was hatched during the last collective bargaining agreement in 2005. If Stern and his owners and the players agree in 2011 to a new age minimum which hikes the age to 20, there will be someone challenging that provision of the collective bargaining agreement because two years is a long period to wait or European basketball leagues will suddenly have a large influx of 18 and 19 year old Americans who want to get paid instead of playing for the glory of some university while his coach gets rich from his school salary, TV and sneaker deals and other marketing partners.
E. J. Maguire knows he would be a better scout if he could only select 20 year olds but realizes that the horse is out of the barn and the NHL system is fine because teams who don't sign a player immediately after the draft have two years to figure out what to do and four years if a player goes to college. NBA rules need to be changed, but then again college wants to be as pure as Caesar's wife with their rules which seem to always favor the schools and are against the people who actually make them money, the so-called student athletes. Larry Bird played with Indiana State after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1978 through an anomaly and because of that, the Bird-Magic Johnson rivalry was born in the 1979 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament when Indiana State and Michigan State matched up in the finals. Perhaps colleges don’t want to be tainted by professionalism by putting out players on the court who were drafted by NBA teams although that is a laughable notion.
The NBA rule has deprived college of one player, Jennings, and has seen many others go to a school and play for one year and leave and now a high school junior, Jeremy Tyler, plans to play ball in Europe instead of San Diego (California) High School and eventually the University of Louisville. Tyler will be eligible for the 2011 NBA Draft. Jennings made his money in Europe last year instead of the NBA. The basketball world is changing and that includes Epiphanny Prince, the women's basketball player who is leaving Rutgers after her junior year to play pro ball in Europe. Prince could not play in the Women's National Basketball Association this summer because of eligibility rules which require players to be 22 years of age and finished four years of college eligibility, be a college graduate or be out of high school for four years. That is the rule the NBA would love to have but it is highly doubtful Stern and his owners will ever see that.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
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Money: sports and teenagers
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