Is the G-League a Viable Alternative to College Basketball?
On October 18th, the G-League announced that they will offer special Select Contracts that will pay $125,000 to elite prospects that are eligible for the G-League, but not the NBA. Essentially, the G-League will provide a pathway for 18-year old prospects to bypass college basketball and immediately turn pro before they get drafted into the NBA. Events in the current developmental landscape suggest that the G-League could become a legitimate alternative for American high school prospects, as more prospects have decided to take on various non-traditional paths of skipping college basketball to get themselves ready for the NBA Draft. In the last draft, Anfernee Simons and Mitchell Robinson were picked by the Blazers and Knicks, respectively, even though they basically sat out the entire season. Before that, current Oklahoma City Thunder guard, Terrence Ferguson decommitted from Arizona to play for the Adelaide 36ers of the Australian NBL and wound up being taken in the first round in 2017. This season, 2018 McDonald’s All-American, Darius Bazley had initially decommitted from Syracuse to play in the G-League, but instead decided to spend this season as a million-dollar intern for New Balance after he signed with agent, Rich Paul in May. Bazley’s situation is interesting because it raises some concerns about the G-League’s viability as a reliable developmental option for young prospects.
One of the reasons why Bazley may have had second thoughts about going to the G-League was the league’s reputation for being a selfish, every man for himself kind of environment, due to the fact that most of the players are older professionals that are mainly competing to get themselves a call-up to the NBA. This was especially true in the early years of the G-League when NBA teams often shared affiliates and weren’t always invested in the development of their younger players. The best example of the league’s past culture of selfishness is a scene from the 2013 documentary, Linsanity, where current Atlanta Hawks guard, Jeremy Lin is not so wistfully recalling his time in what was then called the D-League. The exact clip of the scene is not readily available, but in this part of the film, Lin is basically describing the league as a showcase where players often cared more about their individual stats than wins or anything team related. From there, the film cuts away to an on-court exchange between Lin and his former Reno Bighorns teammate, Patrick Ewing, Jr. Lin doesn’t really react in this exchange, but Ewing’s words serve to summarize the culture of the D-League at the time. This isn’t an exact quotation, but Ewing basically leans over and says something to this extent to Lin. “You the point guard? Make sure to feed me the ball and we won’t have problems.” Because of the G-League’s history, some of Bazley’s concerns about the league not being the best place for the developmental well-being of young high school prospects have considerable merit.
However, the G-League has made positive changes in recent years to go away from its past reputation. For starters, almost every team in the NBA either has its own affiliate or will get one by the end of this season with the lone holdouts being the Denver Nuggets and the Portland Trail Blazers. As a result, the roster situation in the G-League is less chaotic and a little more team friendly than it was before. Also, now that there’s a greater investment in the G-League, NBA teams are taking more control to ensure that their allocated prospects grow in a much better development-friendly culture by keeping player acquisitions and staff hires consistent with the parent team’s organizational philosophy. Because of this, G-League players are less likely to be rewarded with a call-up for selfish, individual play and instead could land an NBA opportunity for making positive, team-oriented contributions. The best example of this is Robert Covington, now with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Covington parlayed his strong play as a three-and-D role player with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in 2013–14 into a contract with the Philadelphia 76ers the following season and he has since become one of the NBA’s best defensive players, earning a spot on last season’s All-Defensive team. Additionally, teams have become more receptive to sending higher-end prospects down for additional seasoning, even if it’s only a relatively brief stint. In the last five years or so, former first round picks like Rudy Gobert, Clint Capela and Dennis Schroder spent some of their rookie season in the G-League before they established themselves as full-time regulars in the NBA and all three of those players eventually landed lucrative eight-figure per-year second contracts afterwards. Due to these changes in recent years, the G-League has become a better place to help young prospects than it was before.
Even though the G-League has made some positive strides, the league still isn’t really set up to develop younger, unpolished prospects from the ground up. One of the primary reasons why this is the case is that the G-League is still a pretty unstable developmental environment where coaching staffs tend to turn over at a high rate. After all, G-League coaches are human beings with ambition and they often leave for better opportunities if they are reasonably successful. As a result, coaches in the G-League don’t tend to stay with their teams for very long and all of the constant change can make it difficult for a raw prospect that requires more hands-on instruction to learn the necessary skills to succeed in the NBA. For example, Bruno Caboclo was infamously “two years away from being two years away” when he was drafted four years ago in 2014. Instead of keeping him stashed overseas and entrusting his development to his team in Brazil, the Toronto Raptors decided to take a more hands-on approach by signing him immediately. Naturally, they sent him to the G-League because he was simply too unpolished to crack their regular rotation. However, it was hard for him to gain any kind of traction to improve because he was placed in an unstable environment to say the least. In fact, Caboclo was assigned to and recalled from the G-League over 60 times in four seasons between 2014–15 and 2017–18. To back track a bit, his rookie season in 2014–15 was the last year that the Raptors didn’t have their own G-League affiliate. As a result, he spent most of that season with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, who had to share an affiliation with the Raptors and 13 other teams, making it tough for Caboclo to even get minutes in the G-League during his rookie year. From there, he played two-plus seasons with Raptors 905 under two different coaches before he was traded to the Sacramento Kings, who then sent him down to play for a different G-League team to play for another new coach. With this example, it’s fairly easy to see how a young player’s growth could be stunted because the G-League isn’t able to guarantee consistent instruction, let alone the quality of coaching needed to work with raw or unpolished basketball players.
Additionally, conflict of interest issues will eventually arise because every G-League team is affiliated with an NBA team. Like all professional sports franchises, NBA teams will exploit any possible edge for the sake of competition. Therefore, if draft prospects play in a league with close proximity to the NBA, it could cause some additional problems in the evaluation process. Primarily, tampering with prospects could become a much bigger issue because teams have some degree of control over their G-League affiliates. Also, if a prospect is assigned to a G-League team, that team’s parent organization is gaining an advantage because they will get a full year of valuable intel into a prospect’s personal habits that the 29 other teams won’t receive. As a result, an NBA team could utilize the information gained from this year-long free look to steer a prospect into that team’s desired direction. For instance, if a team likes a prospect that’s assigned to their G-League affiliate, they can find subtle ways to manipulate playing time or alter that prospect’s role to make them look worse to opposing scouts in games to give their team a better chance to pick that player in the draft. There are also a number of other tricks teams could do with prospects in this situation if the NBA doesn’t address these potential problems due to the natural conflict of interest. With this in mind, the G-League will probably need to expand to include a few extra independent, unaffiliated teams if it is serious about being an alternative pathway for draft prospects. This way, the evaluation process stays relatively independent and the G-League can better serve the best interests of each prospect.
Though the G-League is moving in the right direction in their dedication to developing young players, it’s still a long way away from being a replacement of sorts for college basketball. The new Select Contracts could provide an interesting pathway to the NBA for young prospects that are looking to turn pro immediately after high school. However, the conditions at the moment are still considerably adverse because the G-League has always been a pretty unstable developmental environment due to the constant personnel shuffling and the varying agendas of either teams or players. To ensure that the G-League can best serve the interests of any young prospect looking to sign a Select Contract, additional investments will have to made to make the G-League a better environment to help prospects in maximizing their long-term future in professional basketball. The most recent news that the NBA has hired Rod Strickland and former WNBA player Allison Feaster to oversee the management of the G-League’s professional path program looks like a solid move because it theoretically ensures that these prospects are going to be mentored in their time with the G-League by highly qualified, experienced individuals. However, the execution of this plan is still uncertain and there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the G-League a better option for high-end draft prospects than the current model of going through the NCAA. The process to re-work the American development model may take several years but if the G-League, the NBA and the other powers in charge are willing to commit the necessary resources to make this change happen, it could lead to a much better future for the game of basketball down the line.
