Kobe Bryant played his final game last week. You might have heard. Bit of a to-do.
With the end of Bryant’s career comes the end of something else, too, something that probably had just as big an impact on the NBA as the Mamba’s twenty-year career: the era of players who entered the league straight out of high school.
The population of preps-to-pros players drafted between 1995, when Kevin Garnett revived the trend, and 2005, the final year before the NBA implemented its current age minimum, is a relatively small one, well below 100 men. But the group has had an outsized impact on the league. From Garnett to Bryant, from Tracy McGrady to LeBron James to Dwight Howard, so many of the league’s marquee names from the past two decades never went to college.
With Bryant’s departure, it’s an apt time to reflect on this transformative generation of players, which is exactly what Jonathan Abrams does in his still-relatively-new book, “Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution.” Abrams, a former newspaper reporter and Grantland longform ace, tells the full breadth of the prep-to-pros story, beginning with Moses Malone in 1974 and continuing to the present, as the final high-school draftees (guys like Martell Webster and J.R. Smith) enter the second decades of their careers. The book is a piece of NBA sociology, using the stories of individual players as a lens through which to examine the history of the league’s age limit.
Those stories are for the most part fantastic. Abrams is an ace reporter, and it shows in the way he’s able to connect with and bring to life some of the more famous failed examples of the prep-to-pros experiment. Once LeBron’s rival on the AAU circuit, former New York schoolboy legend Lenny Cooke is now an aging, out-of-shape father living in rural Virginia. As a player, Korleone Young peaked as a 16-year-old manchild; in his brief stint with the Detroit Pistons, he was never able to adjust to not being able to physically overpower his competition. Ndubi Ebi washed out of the league in the blink of an eye and provided Abrams with the best quote in the entire book: “What did I learn in all my years in the NBA? You know what I’ll tell you? The Staples Center has the best nachos.” The book has plenty such cautionary tales.
Much more common, though are the stories of success. Not just the LeBrons and the Kobes, but some of the lesser names who carved out significant careers after entering the NBA straight from high school, men like Rashard Lewis and Amir Johnson. Eddy Curry and Kwame Brown may not have lived up to their sky-high expectations as top-five picks, but the two still combined to earn $130 million dollars during their careers. Do these triumphs outweigh the failures of the prep-to-pro washouts? At its heart, that’s the question “Boys Among Men” tries to answer.
If anything has been worked out in the past decade of hand-wringing and debate, it’s that the age limit question is a difficult one. Since 2006, the NBA has required Americans to be at least 19 years old during the year of the draft and at least one season removed from high school in order to be eligible. In practice, that essentially forces the nation’s top recruits to spend one year (more like six months) at the college of their choice before being eligible to earn a living in their chosen field.
From a moral perspective, I advocate the NBA doing away with the age limit. It would be the best thing for the players, allowing them (in general, of course) to earn more money over a longer period of time, maximizing their ability to monetize the skills that make them unique and highly employable. I think it would also be a good thing for the fans. Examples like McGrady, Jermaine O’Neal, and Amare Stoudemire show that the NBA can develop teenage talent just as well as, if not better than, college basketball; the common fear that prep-to-pros players dilute the quality of the league just simply isn’t backed up in the evidence. I totally understand the selfish desire to force players to spend four years in college so we can all have fun watching them play in March Madness, but from a perspective of labor rights, I can’t really get behind it. Let them go pro.
But the question isn’t that simple. Should the NBA act from a moral perspective, or should it act in its own best interests as a multibillion-dollar enterpise? Commissioner Adam Silver isn’t employed by his 30 owners to make them look all warm and cuddly to Marxists; he’s employed to maximize revenue. And from that vantage point, it maybe the NBA should impose an even steeper age limit. Requiring players to be 20 years old and two years out of high school (or 21 years old and three years removed) would create a much more marketable crop of rookies. Instead of college freshmen relatively unknown to a national audience, the top of the draft would feature NCAA superstars who could drive new customers to the league. If the NBA has the option to outsource the development of its stars to a cartel that will plaster their images all over the national consciousness every March — well, that sounds like a better plan than the D-League.
The argument that 18-year-olds can vote and serve in the military and should thus be able to play pro basketball makes some sense, but it sort of misses the point. The federal government isn’t saying 18-year-olds can’t play basketball; a private employer is. Much like law firms can prefer their employees have law degrees, the NBA is very much allowed to prefer its employees have spent at least X years in college.
That’s why the conversation around this issue is always so cloudy. When fans say, “the NBA should get rid of the age limit,” what do they really mean? Players, agents, the league itself, and fans all have different and competing motivations.
Abrams has an opinion of his own, an argument he makes in the final chapters, but he doesn’t have a single answer or conclusion. That’s not the point of the book. Instead, he focuses on bringing to life and illuminating one of the most interesting cross-sections of athletes in recent sports history, digging into their successes, their failures, and the reasons for the both. It’s an exceedingly well-reported portrait of humanity that happens to raise some big-picture questions about labor, poverty, manipulation, and big business. Oh, and basketball. What more could you ask for?