Abolish the NBA’s One-and-Done Rule
The NBA’s one-and-done rule stops players from entering the league straight from high school. This pushes top players into the NCAA, which makes billions off them, and reduces the window in which athletes, whose careers are often cut short, can earn.
Kentucky’s Justin Edwards, an ESPN number-one ranked player in his class just a year ago, went undrafted in this year’s NBA draft. This took his likely salary from the $57 million that he would have earned over a four-year period to the roughly $500,000 he will make this year on a two-way contract. (Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
Last month’s NBA draft marked almost two decades of the league’s “one-and-done” rule, a measure that prevents players from joining the National Basketball Association straight from high school. Since the NBA instituted the rule in 2005, top athletes from each prospective draft class have been restricted from entering the NBA and have instead been funneled to the collegiate ranks. As a result, the ruling has allowed the NBA and the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) to work together to ensure the quality of their respective products at the expense of a fair and competitive labor market — cratering the earning potential of these teenage basketball players to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, in a career notorious for its brief earnings window.
Drafts are a process by which professional franchises are given the power to select which athletes they want as their employees, instead of the athlete themselves getting to choose their employer. This process was initially developed as an attempt at fostering parity in different sports leagues, ensuring that no single organization would dominate the league from a competitive standpoint. However, this practice is unique to North America. Around the globe, other countries utilize farm systems and minor leagues that involve a series of transfers from lesser-experienced professional teams all the way up to the highest-level teams with which fans are familiar.
The Origins of the One-and-Done Rule
Traditionally, college basketball players spent four years playing for their respective universities, only then declaring for the pros. That was until NBA-hopeful Spencer Haywood came along — at that time only a sophomore at the University of Detroit — and sued the NBA over antitrust violations. This created the Spencer Haywood Hardship rule, which allowed players to leave college early for what at that time was the American Basketball Association (ABA), assuming they met a threshold of financial hardship, and eventually led to the dismantling of age-related eligibility altogether for over three decades.
During this time, many of the nation’s top high-school players chose to forego their collegiate eligibility to go pro. Some went on to become the best players in their class, netting multiyear contracts worth millions. This included some of the more recognizable names in the sport — LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tracy McGrady, Moses Malone, and Darryl Dawkins — indisputably all-time greats whose success did not depend on an unpaid stopover at some university. Yet despite the talent of some prospects, many entered the NBA ill-prepared. Whether it was underdeveloped skill sets or struggling to navigate the off-court realities of being a poor teenager thrust into a wealthy man’s world — many once-sought-after prospects failed to live up to the lofty expectations of their draft status, and flamed out in the years following their selection.
Then in 2005, NBA commissioner David Stern instituted the rule, pushing back the draft eligibility requirements one year. Stern voiced his concern over a league he felt was becoming too young. That same year, he instituted a controversial dress-code policy. Stern said he felt it was “unseemly” for pro scouts to be in high-school gyms and admitted that the league “would like a year to look at them,” referencing the required one year spent in college. From the perspective of league officials and team executives, these high-school players created an element of risk and unwanted job insecurity. They were effectively making a bet on a young talent that could either bear fruit for a franchise, or be out of the league before their next contract — along with the management staff responsible for drafting the player.
The one-and-done rule served as a way to ensure that the NBA could essentially outsource its professional-development and player-marketing responsibilities to the NCAA — simultaneously improving the college product that had suffered from the talent drain of the high-school-to-NBA model — while avoiding investing in the “wrong” young stars, thereby insulating team executives from public scrutiny. This put the motivations of personnel decision-makers squarely at odds with the financial interests of young athletes potentially in need of significant pay days.
For example, Kentucky’s Justin Edwards, an ESPN number-one ranked player in his class and projected number-one overall pick by outlets like USA Today and the Athletic just a year ago, went undrafted in this year’s NBA draft. This took his likely salary from the $57 million that he would have earned over a four-year period (excluding lucrative sponsorship deals that go hand-in-hand with that particular draft position), to the roughly $500,000 he will make this year on a two-way contract. Similarly, the number-one high-school player in the nation this year, Duke incoming freshman Cooper Flagg, would’ve been in line for similar a pay day approaching $60 million over four years, but instead will make just over $1 million next year in college.
In fact, since the institution of the one-and-done rule, every single number-one overall pick in the NBA draft has been either an international player or an NCAA product who spent exactly one year in college before entering the draft. In other words, they’ve been a player who would have gone straight from high school. The rule has, by some calculations, cost these players collectively more than a billion dollars in lost income during these prime earning years.
The Future of the League
In recent years, the rule has come under scrutiny, with the sham NCAA Commission headed up by none other than Condoleezza Rice even recommending the league do away with it. Current NBA league commissioner Adam Silver has followed suit. And despite recent momentum to roll back the rule at the conclusion of the last collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiation, it was ironically the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) who chose to keep it for the time being. While initially opposed to the ruling in 2005, the NBPA has claimed it wants to ensure it is able to do right by its veteran members, whose roster spots may be threatened by allowing these young players to enter the league a year early.
However, the good news is that athlete welfare is trending up. Previous to the 2021 Supreme Court decision NCAA v. Alston, athletes were excluded from moneymaking opportunities such as brand-partnership deals, video-game-likeness rights, and merchandise rights. Additionally, those players who were caught in violation of these rules were penalized, and their collegiate careers tarnished. Now we’re seeing some college athletes making hundreds of thousands, if not millions, through various name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals that have managed to at least partially compensate some athletes for the value they bring to their respective universities and the NCAA writ large (an organization that brought in over a billion dollars in revenue just from last years’ March Madness tournament alone.). Similarly, alternatives to college including international leagues, the NBA G League, and organizations like the novel Overtime Elite give young basketball players options to earn a living directly out of high school.
As these encouraging developments slowly chip away at the false amateurization of young athletes, measures like the one-and-done rule will become increasingly irrelevant. The next big step would be for the league and the NBPA to agree on a veteran-friendly option to get rid of the current rule during the next CBA negotiations, and work toward revamping its recently shuttered G League Ignite program — the NBA’s own answer to the college alternative question. Too many promising young basketball talents have come and gone without getting their fair share for the value they produce, and with the NCAA’s student-athlete fiction on the way out, it’s time the NBA rights its wrongs and does away with this arbitrary, anticompetitive ruling, and finally takes responsibility for the stewardship of its young and future stars.