Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose, and Tyreke Evans are all high profile NBA players that have one thing in common… one and done.
‘One and done’ is a player who attends college for only one year and then declares for the NBA draft. The controversy surrounding these players continues to climb in the realm of the college basketball world. The question being presented now is “How is this rule affecting a high school basketball player’s decisions on their education?”
Prior to the institution of the rule in the 2005 collective bargaining agreement that players must be at least 19-years-old or one year removed from high school to enter the draft, some of the NBA’s most prominent names had come straight from high school to join the ranks of the elite.
However, today it becomes more apparent that the rule has become a mockery since its induction. Since the first official draft where the rule has been in place, 2006, there have been 26 one and done players drafted. Less than half of those players have lived up to the expectations.
College programs are suffering most from this rule. On average a basketball scholarship is worth about 40,000 dollars a year, so imagine the players that are passed over for these one-year wonders. Kentucky University basketball coach John Calipari is possibly the most notorious coach for recruiting these types of players.
For the past three years he has recruited players who were well-known including Derrick Rose, Tyreke Evans, and this year’s projected number one overall pick John Wall.
Validating my point takes only one statistic: one quarter of the teams in last year’s NCAA tournament graduated less than 40 percent of its players. With those types of numbers the NBA should be full of scholars’ right? Wrong.
If this trend continues, pretty soon the league will be full of slam-dunking, no look passing, dribble driving morons. The newly adopted slogan of the league is “the NBA cares;” obviously it is not about education.