College basketball has been changed for the better since the NBA no longer allows players to come in straight out of high school. This rule was established in 2006 to encourage the young players to play at least a season at the collegiate level. Even with this rule, they don’t have to play college basketball because they can go overseas to play professionally or even take a year off.
Most high school players weren’t happy about the rule change, as they feel like it holds them back. Some even feel like it’s bad for their career because they aren’t as good as they could have been if they had gone right to the pros at 18 years old.
This also gives the NCAA players out of high school that would have never ended up playing at the college level if it weren’t for the rule change.
Most of the best players go to college for one year and then leave for the NBA draft. This plan is known as “the one and done”, because they go for one year and then instantly depart. The majority of the best teams in the country are led by multiple players who are doing the “one and done,” led by the Kentucky Wildcats and their head coach John Calipari. Calipari has become notorious for successful “one and dones” at Kentucky, which has led him to landing the top recruiting class the past five seasons. This past season Kentucky went undefeated in the regular season and lost in the final four.
Legendary Duke University head coach Mike Krzyzewski has also joined in as a key contributor to the new style of the “one and done” strategy. This year Duke had three of the top 20 recruits in the country coming out of high school. Duke won the national championship this year on the backs of their freshmen. The freshmen accounted for almost all of Dukes points in the national championship game, scoring 60 of their 68 points against Wisconsin. Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow two of Dukes “one and dones” are going to be selected in the top five picks of the upcoming NBA draft this June. Tyus Jones, Duke’s freshman point guard this past season, was MVP of the national championship game and may forgo the rest of his college career to be a first round pick this June.
If you take a look back at the NBA draft in recent years all of the top selections have been “one and dones” dating back to 2010 when John Wall was selected first out of Kentucky after his freshman year. The next year Kyrie Irving was selected first overall fresh out of Duke, despite only playing four games there due to injury. In 2012, Anthony Davis won the national championship at Kentucky and set an NCAA Division I block record for a single season. He was taken first by the New Orleans Hornets.
In 2013 Anthony Bennett was taken first overall after a dominate one season at UNLV under veteran coach Dave Rice. Perhaps one of the most hyped players coming into the league of this decade was Andrew Wiggins. Wiggins was a one-year phenom at Kansas, then immediately went pro and was selected first by the Cleveland Cavaliers in last year’s draft.
There is no way that the NBA can get away with this forever because no one in America wants talent to be held back. As long as they are getting away with it, the NCAA needs to embrace that the NBA doesn’t allow these kids to come in from high school. If they were to go pro out of high school, college basketball would lose all of its biggest superstars. Coming straight out of high school has worked out perfectly fine for NBA superstars like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James and Dwight Howard. Who knows if they would have been as good as they are now if they had to go to college for a season instead of the extra year they got when they were 18.