Professional sports in America are growing quickly. They are rapidly expanding businesses that want to make money while putting out the best product. The NBA is one of the largest businesses in sports, and their product, are the players. The way the NBA obtains it’s players is through the NBA draft which currently allows players one year out of high school that are at least 19 years old be eligible to be drafted. I feel this current draft system is not ideal for the NBA or for college basketball.

    In 2006 the NBA changed the draft rules. Years prior, players could go from high school to the pros without having to wait a year to become eligible. The change was to protect the league by having the players be a year more mature when they enter the NBA. Players would have another year to let their body, mind, and skills improve before they enter. This current system creates a lot of problems, however those problems are fixable. In order to improve college and pro basketball, I think the NBA needs to change the rules in two ways:

Allow players to go straight from high school to the pros.

If a player decides to not go to pros out of high school, they must wait two years to become eligible.

College sports are great, we can see people our age play sports at high levels. We go to high school with these people, we dorm with these people, and then they are playing games on national television. We can connect with college players because we are also college students. Currently, the college game suffers from players who come to school for one year. These “student”-athletes are being used by the school for money, and in return these students don’t have to worry about classes. It makes a mockery of the system that a player can take easy freshman courses for a semester, then when the season ends not have to worry about school anymore.
The current system also makes the game more sloppy. The best players leave right away and teams do not have the opportunity to gel and grow together. According to an article written by BleacherReport.com, the top 10 college teams of all time predated 1990, when players started to leave early for the pros more frequently.

Forcing players to stay two years in college would increase star power in the college game, it would increase the talent level, and it would increase the enjoyment and popularity of the college game. Also, it would add more responsibility and credibility to colleges and players about the whole “student” part of being a student-athlete.
Even though the majority of top draft picks in the NBA are players that go one and done in college, six of the past ten winners of the Rookie Of the Year award have spent at least 2 years in college. The more time players spend in college, the more ready they are to excel the NBA. However there are special cases of players, such as LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, where a player is so good out of high school that they can successfully make it to the NBA without college. This is a rare case, however it is possible, so it is fair to give these once-in-a-generation players the chance to make the leap. Gerald Green is one player who was able to go from high school to the pros before the new rule was made in 2006. He regrets his choice, saying now that, “Not everybody is LeBron James ... He came in ready and he dominated the league. There's a lot of players that have to get developed.” If the NBA wants their product to be the best that it can be, then they need to make sure that the players coming in are as good as possible. By adopting my suggested rule, the NBA would allow future superstar prospects such as LeBron James to enter the league out of high school, but they would also improve their game by having more experienced, mature, and physically gifted athletes come into the league.

This proposed change would do a lot of good for the game, but it would definitely be met with opposition from younger players who neither want to go straight from high school nor stay two years in college. However, I think the older players would think that it would be best for everyone if more time was spent learning and developing in a better setting such as the college game. This is a win-win scenario for everyone.