There was a time when college basketball players were expected to stick around. But now, the best players are one and dones. They play one year and then depart after their freshman seasons for the NBA. You can blame the culture, but the real culprit is the NBA’s rules, which stupidly state that a player has to be at least one year removed from high school to enter the draft. That forces players to play in college for a year when they otherwise would have skipped the college game entirely.
Today all five starters on Kentucky’s national champion basketball team declared for the NBA draft. Anthony Davis was a no-brainer, but no one was shocked when Terrence Jones, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Doron Lamb, and Marquis Teague left as well. Teague, Davis and Gilchrist only played one year for Kentucky.
Here at onlinebetting.net, we try not to get into the politics of sports, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. I have nothing against Kentucky and loved watching them play the last 3 years under Coach Calipari. Still, it’s wrong to see college as a one-year NBA apprenticeship. It should be a place of higher learning where scholar athletes can also participate in sports. We’ll never get back to that time, but to make things better, the NBA needs to ditch their rule and let the top-caliber players like Anthony Davis go straight from high school to the pros. Did he grow as a person in college? Did he grow as a player? Certainly skipping college didn’t seem to hurt Dwight Howard or Kevin Garnett.
And you can’t blame the programs for taking those players, either. College coaches would be stupid to not recruit the best players. Everyone recruiting against Calipari wants those same players, but right now he’s the one getting them. And playing freshmen is no longer considered a gamble like it once was. It used to be like playing a slot machine (as this wikipedia slot machine article indicates, slots don’t have good odds), where you hope to get lucky but usually don’t. Coach Calipari was able to get a bunch of freshmen to play together as a team and play solid team defense, not an easy task. He’s proven you can do it and win a championship. Everyone will do if it isn’t stopped. The only one who can stop it is the NBA.