Ask most people who have a grasp of both college and pro basketball, and they’ll tell you that an age minimum of 20 for the NBA is a good thing. But they won’t give you the reason you’d think they would.
An age limit, on the table in the upcoming NBA labor negotiations, isn’t needed to save college basketball. If this NCAA tournament is any indication, the game is getting along just fine with what it’s got–better than it has in a long time, even if the games aren’t teeming with future Hall of Famers.
Rick Pitino will tell you, and he has seen the signs of damage the talent exodus supposedly had on the colleges, and what it did to the NBA. He’s glad he’s on the right side of it now–so glad, in fact, that in a way, he doesn’t miss what the NBA took from him and his Louisville team before this season started.
If two recruits, high school point guard Sebastian Telfair and junior college swingman Donta Smith, had come to Louisville instead of jumping to the pros after committing, “we may not have made the Final Four,” Pitino said.
You can’t replicate the chemistry his current team has, he said.
The entire Final Four might be different if the rosters all over the country were different, if the likes of LeBron and Carmelo and Dwight Howard had followed the path taken by the stars of previous decades. The dynamic of the whole field surely would have changed, and if ever there was a tournament that didn’t need messing with, it’s this one.
Sometimes, the pro game is exactly what a player needs, and sometimes college is the ideal fit. It merely took the better part of a decade for that to become apparent to the hard-liners on both sides of the issue.
Under constant attack for so long, both the colleges and the NBA have managed to undergo a renaissance this season, so much so that a big postseason for the NBA later this spring might throw a wrench into the whole age-limit issue after all.
It definitely has calmed down on the college side, at long last.
The truth is that the cold war between the colleges and pros over this issue is thawing at long last, and it took the zany, unpredictable, thoroughly engaging action of this tournament to warm things up.
