One and done, but never as simple as it sounds

Michael Beasley wonders where his statistics might stack up if he had remained at Kansas State longer than his freshman year, when he averaged 26.2 points and 12.4 rebounds.

But Beasley did what everyone anticipates Kansas’ Andrew Wiggins and Joel Embiid, Duke’s Jabari Parker and Kentucky’s Julius Randle will do after this season — go pro after one year in college.

Now with the Miami Heat, Beasley’s second stop in a six-year career with the team that took him No. 2 overall in the 2008 NBA draft, he has already been cut once, traded twice and played for three teams. He has also been arrested on suspicion of marijuana possession. And he’s only 25.

Asked if he had advice for the four freshmen — and perhaps four other freshmen who could be lottery picks in June — Beasley gets to the heart of the dilemma for these talented teens.

“If I could tell them one thing, it would be, ‘It’s your life, it’s what you make it,’” Beasley told USA TODAY Sports. “I think my only regret, and not just with college, is trying to make other people happy all of the time. If I could do everything over, I’d do it for me.”

“I can’t say I would have stayed another year. I grew up poor, dirt poor … Everybody is different. Me? If I came from a better financial situation, I could have been there two, three or four years.”

Players are not allowed to enter the NBA draft until one year after their high school class graduates, with a season of college basketball being the typical choice for top players. The so-called one-and-done rule has been a hot topic in college basketball since it was implemented by the NBA in 2006, but arguably never more so than this season with potentially a record number of freshman in position to bolt.

While players see the rule as an opportunity to fulfill their dreams, make millions of dollars and support their families, college basketball coaches say it has profoundly affected the game.

“It tarnishes what we’re trying to do as coaches; it tarnishes the idea that kids are here to get an education,” Colorado coach Tad Boyle says. “It just does. People know it. That’s why there are so many people it upsets, and people don’t like it. I don’t know of any person I’ve ever talked to who says, ‘I like the one-and-done.’”

The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) runs through the 2021 draft, however there is an opt-out in 2017 for either side, the owners or the players. New Commissioner Adam Silver told USA TODAY Sports last week he favors raising the minimum age from 19 to 20. Players have long held the opposite view, wanting to revert back to the pre-2006 rules, when players could declare for the draft at age 18.

“Even if (the rule is) not terrible for the NBA right now,” Silver says, “at least talking to a lot of my college coaching friends and college (athletic director) friends, their view is (that) one-and-done is a disaster.”

Since 2006, 57 players who were one year out of high school have been drafted by NBA teams. There have been stars such as Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose, and others who have struggled to stick in the league, including Tiny Gallon and Josh Selby.

“I had a family, and it was a decision to take care of my family,” says Gallon, who played at Oklahoma and was selected 47th overall by the Milwaukee Buck in 2010. “I was at Oklahoma for the money. I had to take care of my family. I felt I was ready, so I came out.

Now 23 and suiting up for the NBA Development League’s Delaware 87ers, Gallon insists he wouldn’t change a thing.

“No, it hasn’t turned out how I thought it would, but that’s the whole process — you never know how the future looks. When I made my decision, I was comfortable with it.”

“That’s always been the big argument. As a player you have to go to college, you have to develop your skills and so forth and so on and then you come to the league,” Bryant told reporters last month. “I think the reality is there’s been a lot of players who’ve come out of high school that were much more successful on average than players that went to college for a year or two years. It seems like the system really isn’t teaching players anything if you go to college.”

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski has spoken out against the one-and-done rule over the years, but even he — just like his peers — has recruited those players. He’s got Parker this season, and two expected one-and-done players in Jahlil Okafor and Tyus Jones coming in next fall.

However, he joins other coaches in lamenting how one-and-done has affected college basketball’s marketing and promotion. Turn on ESPN or any other channel broadcasting college games this season, and you’ll see analysts debating which freshmen have been most valuable to their team, or their draft stock. You’ll hardly see any discussion of upperclassmen or a team-by-team breakdown.

“We’re obsessed with this, young players becoming superstars overnight,” Michigan coach John Beilein says. “There’s this fascination with young players being the next LeBron James, the next Kobe Bryant. It’s unfair, and the expectations are unfair. They’re 19 years old, 18 years old. Let them grow before we put these huge expectations on them.”

That results in pressure — both external and internal — to get to the NBA in one season.

“It’s taking the players who return for their second and third years to a level of insanity, where you become a failure if you at all enter your fourth year in college,” Arizona coach Sean Miller says. “You can’t play. You’re a bum. You did not make it. If you just think about that, where that starts from is players being here for just one year. ‘OK, I’ll come here a second year, but I’ll be damned if I ever get to my third.’ If a player you played against at a McDonald’s All-American game did it in one, and it takes you three, it’s sad.”

Many coaches have espoused the benefits of a rule similar to baseball’s, where players could get drafted out of high school, but if they choose to go to a four-year college they must stay at least three years.

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski encourages freshman Jabari Parker during a game this season.(Photo: Mark L. Baer, USA TODAY Sports)

Krzyzewski, Florida coach Billy Donovan and Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, among others, have been proponents of that type of a system. They point out that there are no rules holding a tennis player back from going pro at a young age. Or a golfer. This argument gets made any time an elite young college player gets injured and potentially costs himself thousands or millions of dollars.

But the realists in the college game know that allowing 18-year-olds to go straight to the pros is not likely to happen. The NBA doesn’t want its scouts in high school gyms, Krzyzewski says.

“The NBA will not take kids out of high school; that’s a no-go,” Boeheim says. “It’s foolish to think about that, because the NBA doesn’t want those guys. The union, the player reps, they don’t want two years; they want to get them out as soon as they can. It’s just not a solvable problem.”

Even so, the two-year minimum is gaining support, at least publicly. It would give college programs more stability, provide players with time to develop and give NBA teams better prospects. It would help perhaps change the image that players are using college campuses as an eight-month pit stop on the way to the pros.

Miller says he believes a two-year rule would “help everybody.” Silver agrees, saying, “We believe the additional year of maturity would be meaningful.”

Still, it’s hard to predict change. The NCAA desires discussion of the issue, President Mark Emmert said late in 2013, but pointed out that it is controlled by the two groups on either side of the NBA’s CBA.

“It takes two parties, neither of which is us,” Emmert said. “I think we need a bigger, broader conversation about what should the relationship between college sport and professional sport be. Some people, me included, don’t have any (problem) with people going to professional athletics and not coming to college.”

If whoever replaces Billy Hunter as the leader of the NBA player’s association prioritizes addressing the one-and-done issue, talks regarding change could at least take place. But even Krzyzewski, one of basketball’s biggest names and most well-connected people, says he doesn’t know if one-and-done will go away.

“It’s one of those issues (where) it needs to be collectively bargained, and for good reason,” Silver says. “I’m trying to look at it not just from the perspective of the NBA because I believe strong college basketball is also beneficial to the NBA and to the game generally.

“This is one of these issues that the larger basketball community needs to come together and address, not just the NBA owners and our players. Youth basketball and college basketball should have a seat at the table as well.”