The NBA’s massive, sweeping changes of the G League announced last week came in tandem with the announcement that a pair of top high school prospects, Jalen Green and Isaiah Todd, would be joining the developmental league. The pair would lead a newly-created team in California and would headline a new program that would see each make $500,000 with many, many other incentives as well.
Most assumed the move came in response to star prospects LaMelo Ball and RJ Hampton opting to take their talents to Australia’s NBL as part of the Next Stars program last year. G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim said as much in an interview with Adrian Wojnarowski after the announcement of the changes.
But Adam Silver wasn’t as quick to signal that as the cause for change. In an interview with reporters about the changes, Silver shot down the notion that the Next Stars program forced the NBA’s hand.
“Frankly, it wasn’t a factor in terms of signing these two young players (Green and Todd) to the G League For us, we know these players – there’s a high likelihood they will come into the NBA. We saw it as an opportunity to work directly on their development as future NBA players.”
This is a situation where multiple things can be true. It is great for the NBA to offer prospects an alternative to the one-and-done college basketball route. It’s also great for the league to get its hands on prospects earlier, figuratively and literally speaking, and have them adapt to life as a professional athlete. The league has also been negotiating with the players union and the NCAA on eliminating the one-and-done rule for multiple years and this move serves as a step toward that process.
But it’s also true that Ball and Hampton had at least some impact on the NBA’s changes of the G League. Whether directly or indirectly, seeing two top prospects spurn not just the NCAA but the Select Contract options, which were far less lucrative than the $500,000 Green and Todd are set to earn, from the G League certainly served as an eye-opener that the G League wasn’t a viable alternative.
Would the NBA have made the changes regardless of Ball and Hampton’s decision? It’s hard to say. The NBA has been one of the more progressive leagues in recent years and decades and would likely have continued looking for ways to make the G League more lucrative. But the Next Stars program forced the NBA to make those changes more quickly.
The result is an alternative for prospects that allows them to earn a salary, improve at the game of basketball and not be forced into a college route that may not best suit them or their needs.
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