David Stern has left the NBA Commissioner’s office 30 years to the day after he took over in 1984. During his tenure in office Stern took professional basketball in America to levels never before enjoyed. The NBA is more popular… and more profitable… than ever before in the history of the league.
Now Mr. Stern is off to the Basketball Hall of Fame and his long time assistant, Adam Silver, has taken over the reins of the NBA. The changeover has been a seamless one so far. Mr. Silver has known that he would be taking over the NBA since the NBA Board of Governors unanimously selected him to succeed Stern back in 2012 and Silver has basically received no opposition for the post. No bad comments in the press… no critics screaming foul. Silver is the man.
Adam Silver often played the ‘bad cop’ to David Stern’s smiling ‘good cop’ act. It was Silver that got to deliver the bad news when something like that came up. So it came as no surprise when he right away tackled one of the hottest issues in the world of basketball today, the ‘one and done’ rule.
As it stands today, a young basketball player aspiring to play in the NBA can do so when he is 19 years old… or be one year removed from high school graduation… thus the name ‘one and done’. One year of college and you can be a pro. The system has many critics and many college coaches who would like to see those eligibility rules change for the professional ranks.
Now the new NBA Commissioner has stated in public that he would like to see another year added to that equation thus raising the requirement to two years of college before being eligible for the NBA. The move is primarily aimed at refining the NBA but its obvious effect on NCAA basketball cannot be overlooked.
Silver stated in a recent interview, “it has been our sense for a long time that our draft would be more competitive if our teams had an opportunity to see these players play an additional year. We believe the additional year of maturity would be meaningful.”
When queried about when these changes might be taking place, Silver replied, “It’s hard to tell. I never quite understood the player opposition.” The next CBA…or collective bargaining agreement opt-out for the NBA is not scheduled to take place until the 2016-2017 season.
Not only would the NBA benefit from this change, the young players themselves will also come out ahead in the long run.
