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"What you miss is that in the other sports the talent may not be there and they wind up in the farm system...that is what it is. If Mark Cuban or other owners want to draft a HS player that is their perogative. Their investment & gamble."
No Bookman. The talent is always there. that's what gets them drafted to start with. it's the development that doesn't show up. they wind up in the farm system initially b/c the talent is there (if you're talking about elite draft picks) but they haven't harnessed all of it yet.
As for Cuban, for example, it's his investment and gamble now, but that doesn't mean it SHOULD be his choice to make. the league's talent situation almost creates a race to the bottom, where bad teams have incentive to take flyers on HS kids knowing that 1) they won't contribute at first so the team will have time to get other high picks, and 2) these guys usually have the highest ceilings, meaning they might get a star. in the short term, a useful and experienced player gets dumped, and the coach spends 3 years babysitting a kid who, far more times than not, can't play at an NBA level. as it stands, owners have an incentive to gamble on these projects because rookie contracts are cheap by nba standards, and because the team that holds a player gets an enormous advantage in resigning him, by having the right to offer more years and more money per year. if you shorten the deals allowed AND lessen the advantage that "home teams" have in bargaining, the system can self-correct w/o an age limit (side note: there IS an age limit right now, it's just 18). with such changes, mark cuban could still blow a pick on a high schooler if he wanted, but he'd have to accept the fact they'd spend 3 years coaching him with little production, then he'd be on the open market with a chance to ditch them for whoever he wanted. deserving HS players would still get picked that way, but owners wouldn't waste picks on marginal prospects who would never produce for them.
kurant, your post smacks of the condescension that makes people like jermaine oneal paranoid. i think oneal's wrong, but didn't say the right thing. we have laws pass all the time that have a disparate impact on one social group or another. the laws themselves aren't racist, but their affects are. whether you would call the result a "racist law" depends on your point of view: focusing on either the law itself or its impact. while i agree with the argument that the league being 4/5 black means that any rule changes affects blacks more, the contrast is more clear when you look at the age limit. i can think of one white player who would've been affected by this in the past ten years (which is basically the timeframe of HSers going pro). i can think of TONS more black players that would've been affected. so, even with the nba being 4/5 black, the group of early entrants that would be affected (at least looking backwards at who would've been affected) is more like 97% black. how you interpret that is up to you. does it make it a "racist law?" maybe. kids can always play overseas if they dont qualify for college i guess.
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