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.
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