Tag: Next Stars

Adam Silver says NBL was not a factor in NBA G League changes

While G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim noted Ball and Hampton played a role in the G League’s changes, Adam Silver denied that idea.

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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LaMelo Ball, RJ Hampton’s playing in NBL led to NBA’s change of G League

In opting to play in the NBL last season, LaMelo Ball and RJ Hampton played a significant role in the NBA’s revamp of the G League.

LaMelo Ball and RJ Hampton shook up the college and professional basketball landscapes last year by opting to play basketball in the National Basketball League in Australia over playing stateside. While Ball likely never would have had the chance to play in college due to eligibility issues, both players turned down the chance to take part in the G League’s select contract program in order to play abroad.

On Thursday, the NBA announced massive changes to the program to go hand-in-hand with the decisions of Jalen Green and Isaiah Todd, the former 247Sports’s No. 3 recruit in the 2021 class and the latter ranked No. 13, to join the G League’s initiative.

The massive changes are headlined by a new pay structure that will see Green, Todd and any future prospects that join make $500,000 for their single season in the G League. That figure is significantly higher than the $150,000 that Ball or Hampton could have made last season with a Select Contract.

In talking about what led to the revamping of the program, Ball and Hampton’s decision played a big role in the NBA and G League’s overhaul.

Via ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski:

Once top 2020 draft prospects LaMelo Ball and RJ Hampton chose to play professionally in Australia this year, Silver became more determined in pushing (G League president Shareef) Abdur-Rahim to explore a financial and basketball structure that enticed top American prospects. Green represents a massive breakthrough for the NBA’s long-standing goal of gaining access to top prospects who want an alternative to the NCAA.

“That’s a real program that the NBL has,” Abdur-Rahim told ESPN. “It’s appealing. We have kids leaving the United States — Texas and California and Georgia — to go around the world to play, and our NBA community has to travel there to scout them. That’s counterintuitive. The NBA is the best development system in the world, and those players shouldn’t have to go somewhere else to develop for a year. They should be in our development system.”

The NBL Next Stars program gained steam with Ball and Hampton proving it to be a viable option for prospects as both are expected to be lottery picks with Ball in the conversation for the top pick. As one-and-done talks with the NCAA continue to drag along, the NBA viewed it as a necessity to offer some form of an alternative.

The G League program has many interesting facets to it and should go a long way in keeping prospects stateside rather than playing abroad. Playing against fellow professionals, as prospects would in Australia, still has viability to it that won’t quite be the case in the G League but whether that’s worth living half-way across the country is a decision the prospects will have to make.

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