The thorny question of the return of high school students to the NBA

In 2005, David Stern succeeded in imposing an age limit on entry into the NBA. Faced with the influx of high school students, often ill-prepared for professional life, the former « commissioner » wanted players to wait until they were 20 to be able to join the Great League, to force them to evolve for at least two years in NCAA.

Finally, a compromise had been found to impose an age limit of 19 years. The problem is that the best high school students, the famous « one-and-dones », only spend a year at university, and more and more of them are trying to circumvent this rule, by going abroad or in the G-League between high school and the NBA.

In short, for Adam Silver and the players’ union, this age limit no longer has much interest and the two camps are negotiating its disappearance for the next collective agreement, except that ESPN notes that it is not so simple.

The NBA wants agents to share their clients’ medical information with all teams, so they can make informed draft choices. On the side of the agents, on the contrary, we want to keep a certain freedom with the sharing of medical information, because it is for them the main lever of pressure upstream of the Draft, in order to avoid certain teams for their customers.

Another important point: since a lot of Draft picks have been traded for years to come, the disappearance of « one-and-done » could not happen in the short term because it would significantly change the value of some Drafts while of teams traded with that 19-year limit in mind.