MLS, Not MLB, Should be the NBA’s Draft Model

NBA commissioner Adam Silver let slip that, once again, basketball’s favorite pointless political football will be punted into the air again, which means another round of talk about the baseball model. CBS’ Matt Norlander talked about the MLB model with college basketball coaches and the reaction was decidedly mixed. Some of that was based on misconceptions though:

• The MLB draft model does not require a player to declare for the draft. Every eligible player is placed into the draft pool. So if you truly followed the baseball model, there would be no more choosing whether or not to declare for the draft, it would choosing whether or not to accept your draft position.
• The agent problem wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it is in baseball if the NBA adopted the real MLB model (again with no declaring for the draft) and the NCAA has already relaxed the agent rules for high schoolers drafted by MLB teams. With the NBA’s rookie salary scale, there might even be less to do for an agent between the end of the college basketball season and after the draft, when players decide to accept their NBA contract (which can’t be negotiated in the way an MLB contract can).

Then there’s this gem:

The sentiment of just about every coach I spoke with: the NBA and NCAA need to meet, multiple times, to really work together to do what’s best for the sport of basketball in the United States.

Jeffery Kessler would be waiting outside the door of these meetings with copies of his new antitrust complaint. If these meetings occurred, they might be what’s best for basketball in the United States, but they would be the end of amateur collegiate basketball in the United States, and thus likely the end of amateur collegiate sports altogether.

The core problem with the baseball model is that it doesn’t eliminate the real fairness issue with the one-and-done rule:

With the baseball rule, you then, in theory, build up freshmen into sophomores and have players returning and teams getting older and ideally better. But from a philosophical and moral standpoint the question must be asked: How is it any more fair to tell a 19-year-old sophomore-to-be he can’t capitalize on his newfound market worth than an 18-year-old freshman-to-be?

At some point you will have players who are good enough to be drafted who won’t be able to be drafted simply because they don’t meet an age requirement.

So aside from no age requirement, which the NBA seems dead set against and the National Basketball Players Association doesn’t seem really interested in fighting for, how do you solve this? By turning to MLS, a system that might look more restrictive but is actually more fair to the player, while benefiting both the NBA and college basketball more than the baseball model would.

The MLS’s basic draft eligibility rule is that you must have exhausted your collegiate eligibility (we’ll ignore international players for a second). Not every senior is considered eligible for selection, teams must petition to put a player on the list.

The exception to that basic rule is the MLS early entry system called Generation adidas. The process starts with MLS teams making recommendations to the league for early entry candidates. That list, which might start out as big as 20–25 players (that link is 7 1/2 years old, so it may be out of date) is eventually whittled down to a class of 5–8 players in most years.

Those players are offered contracts, often much higher than they would get as normal draft picks. MLS then gives incentives for teams to draft Generation adidas players, like having them not count against roster limits or the salary cap.

The caveats with this type of system is that MLS is getting away from Generation adidas as it moves toward bring more players up through club youth teams as homegrown players. Plus the mechanisms of a player signing with the league then being assigned to a team are much simpler due to MLS’s single entity structure. MLS employs the players, so the contract isn’t changing hands between legal entities.

So how would this work in the NBA? The process of scouting players would be the same. Teams would scout players from high school through college and would submit names of players they would like to draft. The league office would gather those names, potentially do some scouting of their own, then over the course of the season compile the final list. Those players would be approached by the NBA and offered a contract.

That contract would initially have a standard length and value. One option might be whatever the last first round pick gets that year in the NBA draft, so about $3 million guaranteed over 3 years. Then the draft occurs. When one of these players is drafted, the contract would be assigned to the new team and its value would increase to whatever the rookie scale says the contract is for that draft pick. If a player falls to the second round, the value of the contract would not change, and perhaps the league picks up part of the tab for the team so as not to discourage selecting these players.

If a player who was signed to an early entry contract goes undrafted, the NBA could then have a process where teams could claim the player by agreeing to the contract (again with or without the NBA paying part). If no one wants the player, the NBA would be on the hook for the contract and assign them to the D-League until a team wants to claim them.

But those situations would be rare since the whole point of this system is to only sign players who will definitely be drafted, ideally in the first round. That might mean essentially a limit of 30 early entry candidates, although probably fewer, more like the 15–20 range.

The NBA benefits here by hand selecting its early entry candidates, bringing more certainty to the draft process, and by having more players stay longer in college, a developmental system the NBA doesn’t pay for and which has additional benefits for the NBA in terms of exposure for future players and promoting value the NBA would like to be associated with like education.

For college basketball, far fewer players would go to the NBA each year, even if it included a few high schoolers. Coaches would have much more certainty about their rosters. More players would be staying longer. Players who leave would also leave with a professional contract in hand, so there would be less stigma about one-and-done departures, not to mention fewer APR issues (assuming increased transfers aren’t an unintended consequence of this system).

But what about the player? Back to Matt Norlander:

Before moving any further, understand this is the perma-reality: There is no perfect solution. There is no rule that benefits the NBA as it does college basketball as it does the players. The NBA is run by smart people, and if there was an endgame that magically worked for everyone invested they’d have found it by now.

So, no matter what, one of the three aforementioned entities — the NBA, college basketball or the player — will be forced into sacrifice in any variable. Obviously, since the NBA and the NBA Players Association bargain the rule, the NBA is not going to be hindering itself.

That leaves college basketball and/or the player on the short end. Over the past decade-plus, the rights of the player have been pushed back.

At first glance, the player gets the short end of the stick here once again. If the NBA only takes 15–20 early entry candidates each year, that’s a big drop from say the 30 underclassmen drafted in 2016.

To see how this is more fair, you have to look at the players who couldn’t enter the draft. For a high school senior under the current system or a college freshman under the baseball model, if they ask why they’re not allowed to enter the NBA draft, the answer is “because you’re not old enough” or “because you missed your chance and now you have to wait”. This despite all those cliches about being allowed to join the Army or sign a contract, or anything else that legal adults can do.

Under a version of the MLS model, if the 25th best underclassmen or high schooler asks why they’re not allowed to enter the NBA draft, the answer is “because you’re not good enough yet.” If a player wants to get into the draft earlier, he doesn’t have to invent a time machine and be born a year earlier. All he has to do is be good enough. It might be more limited, but it is more limited based on merit, rather than age. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least an improvement over the somewhat arbitrary nature of the current system.

Would the NBA do this? It depends on how difficult this system is to implement without a single-entity structure and whether the NBA wants to be in the business of scouting high schoolers, even with these limits. But if the NBA could adopt such a system, it would make a lot more sense for a league with rosters and draft classes the size of the NBA’s rather than MLB’s, it would improve both the NBA and college basketball, and it would be fairer to players even if fewer underclassmen go to the NBA each year.