Monday, April 25, 2011

Kentucky Needs To Pay Attention To NBA's Labor War



A very interesting development will happen when the NBA goes into their labor war this summer and autumn: the decisions the league and the players meet on will have a huge impact on college basketball.

In short, it could really impact Kentucky.






No coach has gotten more from the one-and-done era that John Calipari. Coach Cal does a great selling job to these guys that they just do their thing for a season and he'll put them in the NBA as a high draft pick. The fact that Derrick Rose (Cal's one-and-doner in Memphis) is tearing up the NBA and John Wall, like Rose, was a No. 1 overall draft pick means that these elite talents will take a strong look at Lexington.

Think about the type of success Calipari has had in the last six or so years that the one-and-done rule has been in effect.

The NBA and the players association could really put a damper on all of that. Maybe. Many people feel the NBA (the NCAA has no choice in these matters) will make a significant change in the one-and-done rule. The thinking is that the NBA will allow a player to jump to the NBA from high school or go to at least two years of college.

Think of the impact on the college game if this came to pass. All of those big-time recruits that Calipari has been ushering in to Kentucky and, before that, Memphis would not have been there. There would have been no John Wall, no DeMarcus Cousins, no Brandon Knight, no Michael Gilchrist and no Anthony Davis. They'd all have lept to the NBA and filled up the upcoming draft.

On the flip side, Kentucky fans would've most likely had two years of Eric Bledsoe, Daniel Orton and maybe Terrence Jones. Ya know, some sort of carry over from one year to the next.

One of the things that Kentucky fans whine about is that the players they fall in love with for a season are gone when the campaign is done. They hate it. But for any rule to be in place that would make players stay in college for two or three years will most certainly allow guys to jump straight from high school. So those elite guys Kentucky had been getting wouldn't be there.

This isn't to pick on Kentucky; many teams would have felt the pain of losing those one-and-dones. Heck Ohio State has had a steady diet of those kind of guys over the last five seasons.

So Kentucky fans ... even the ones that hate the NBA ... need to keep an eye on what goes down in the Association.

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