College Basketball: An alternative to the ‘One and Done’

By John Woodcock | Jul 25, 2017

DURHAM, NC - JANUARY 23: Dennis Smith Jr. /

Twelve years in, College Basketball should be ready to adjust away from the ‘one and done’ environment.

College Basketball is gaining top recruits all of the time.

Marvin Bagley III visited the Duke Blue Devils over the weekend according to reports from Gary Parrish of CBS Sports. Bagley is considering reclassifying into this year’s recruiting class and graduating early from high school. There is speculation that his destination could be Duke, USC, or Arizona.

There is no speculation about what Bagley’s next move is. Either in 2018 or 2019 (depending on whether he reclassifies), Bagley is expected to the number one pick in the NBA Draft. His time in college ball will be limited to a single season. This is due to the one-and-done rule that requires prospective NBA players to be 19 or a year removed from their high school graduation in order to play pro basketball.

The rule was instituted during an NBA labor negotiation. The losers were high school prospects that would have been drafted immediately in any era, but they were not at the bargaining table. NBA owners and executives were getting burned on the ones who never amounted to much, and the other problem is that the NBA was not a teaching league. The NBDL was a baby at that point, and skill honing at the pro level is more of a personal thing.

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The deal for the NBA was to get another year of tape against real competition on these prospects to make better evaluations and therefore fewer mistakes. The side benefit was guaranteeing a talent infusion of elite prospects into the college game if only for a year.

Twelve years in, perhaps it is time to look at the effectiveness of the one-and-done system. NBA commissioner Adam Silver has said that the system is not working for anyone involved. Despite the extra year that elite high school prospects receive, Silver said that NBA scouts and execs are not happy with their level of skill. Level of skill was, of course, one of the main reasons to inject a new age minimum in the first place.

This year’s NBA Draft may bring the issue to a head. The top ten picks were freshmen. It will be interesting to judge their impact as a class.

Silver wants to move the minimum up another year to twenty. This would enable another year of tape to be collected. It would force student-athletes to be students for longer than a semester (assuming you don’t believe they are being taken care of anyway). Presumably, they would be more mature, but that varies on a person to person basis.

The players, on the other hand, want the minimum brought back down to eighteen.

The reasons are twofold. One, there are truly exceptional players like LeBron James that did not need college ball. Two, NBA contracts are now structured almost to an exact science. Rookies are relatively underpaid for four years with their first big payday coming in their fifth year. Twenty kicks that process down the road a year so that a player could conceivably lose a big contract opportunity at the back of their career (if they are really good).

If this looks like a negotiation starter, then good for you. The logical compromise is to maintain the current rule.

However, there is another way the NBA could handle the one-and-done rule and give the players and the league something they both want. They could move to the baseball rule of three or none. Recruits could choose to enter the NBA at eighteen, but if they enter college they must play three years or get a degree.

In 2005, the NBA was not equipped for this because the NBDL was new and small. The reason the baseball system works is that baseball teams have a network of minor league teams to send prospects to and their potential flameout does not happen in the bigs but more likely in AA. The new NBGL now has almost as many teams as the NBA itself, and it could absorb the not ready high schoolers. Perhaps the league could be expanded to tiers in the future.

For the other players, three years of college ball was far more typical back in the day. Teams can form and coalesce. Team defense can actually be taught. Basketball IQs will form and a much more polished product will emerge on the college basketball court.

The obvious danger is that every high school senior would then declare for the draft. Let them, if they don’t have an agent. There are only thirty picks worth of guaranteed money in the first round. If they wash out of the predraft process then they can head to school or head to a foreign league.

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There is no perfect solution for when a player should be able to enter the NBA. The current system is a compromise one. A baseball like system would also be a compromise of a different sort. The one question that this issue still dodges is the question of what the identity of college basketball is. That answer would likely provide many of the others.

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