hurt because the coach realizes he has that player or players for 1 year 2 if he's lucky.look at o.state now that oden's gone.texas always recruit talent.but t.motta boy i would'nt want to be in his shoes right now.

My answer was a little lengthy, so I started another diary on my thoughts as to a solution.

Look: When I was 18 years old, I left my parents' house. I did not to go to college. I went straight out into the world and looked for a job. Employers I contacted had a choice as to whether they wanted to take a chance on an 18 year old with no college degree. If they didn't, fine. I kept looking until I found one who did.

That's the way it should work with anyone, ballplayers included. If teams think a high schooler is too raw for the NBA, they should have the choice not to hire him. If a player wants to keep looking for a team who will, that should be his right as well. What there should not be is a rule which arbitrarily forbids two willing, legally recognized parties from entering into a contract with one another.

Of course, I realize that the rationale behind the rule has nothing to do with protecting the welfare of the player as is sometime sanctimoniously suggested. It is little more than a cynical ploy to re-establish the cozy symbiosis that once existed between the NBA and NCAA. With the growing numbers of top-flight high schoolers who were jumping directly to the pros, the NCAA was rapidly losing its marquee value. On the other side of the coin, many dunderhead NBA GMs found themselves increasingly burned when spending high draft picks on high schoolers who were not NBA-ready (sound familiar, Blazerfan?) The solution was simple: funnel all the best prep talent to the colleges for a minimum one year in exchange for allowing the NCAA to serve as a defacto minor league for the NBA. Just the way it was done in the good ol' antebellum past.

Does it matter to the colleges if the star player bolts after a single year? No, by Hades. Moldorf rightly mentions Ohio State. A second-tier hoops program is catapaulted into relevance (and the NCAA finals) by the chance to land Oden and Conley Jr. The increase in revenue and recruiting power more than compensates for the departure of its star players. Don't think that Ernie Kent wouldn't chop off his right arm to get the same opportunity.

THe rule is good, for the player, the school and the NBA It all has to do with maurity. The player gets a year out of his parents house with the responsibility of caring for himself. He will have to learn basic life and survival skills.. I don't care how bad people scream, call me out or whatever, but with VERY few exceptions NO 18yr old is emotionally or mentally ready to be a couple thousand miles from home with no guidance/supervision and suddenly having more money than they know what to do with. Its a recipe for disaster. HOw many of us at 18 would have not made some really stupid mistakes if someone took us away from our families, filled our bank account, told us to stay out of trouble then looked the other way.? I know I would have been a train wreck. A year of maturing can't be anything but beneficial to the young man. To shut down all the peope who want to throw the race card and say that other primarily white sports take kids right out of High School and let them turn pro I'm ready to shoot you down now. Ya, kids leave school and go to the minors in baseball. MOst of those 18yr old kids (and even the college guys) end up spending their first couple of years in the low minors where they live with a host family in a small town. They still get that family atmosphere for a while. By the time they are 20-21 and move up they are ready for the world. Hackey has the same types of programs at the Juniour and low minors levels. THe kids that play for the WinterHawks who are under 18 live with local families and go to local HIghSchools. Both sports have college trusts negotiated into their initial minors contracts in the event that they don't make it. That doesn't happen in the NBA. The HS players who declared but weren't drafted or don't survive beyond their rookie contract have no such safety net. It's not a race thing, its a common sense thing. THere is no way a player doesn't benefit from a year of school. If the coach at that school knows a player is leaving after a year then encourage him to take a class load heavy in business/finance.
  THe school benefits because even a one year run to the Final Four raises your profile nationally and let's the school go out and recruit the guys who are going to stay for 3-4 years. You can't tell me that only getting Oden/Conley even for a year isn't going to help Thad Motta get another great class. If nothing else he has a couple more high profile donars for his program. I think GO can afford a couple bucks.
  THe NBA benifits for two reasons. The most obvious is that the players will come in a year wiser, with a year away from Mom. THe not so obvious reason is marketing/sales. With few exceptions (Oden, Kobe,Garnett) the guys coming out of High School are all relative unknkowns. YOu can't market someone nobody has heard of. By spending a year in college guys like conley, Oden and Durant (down to OJ mayo, Kevin Love next year) come into the league having played on national tv and have built in fan bases from their respevtive schools and tv appearnces. That you can sell. For every LeBRon or Kobe there are 10 Corleone Youngs. Anybody know where he is right now? I think he pumped my gas the other day. Bet he's wishing he took the scholarship now.
  I agree with everyone who says we could abolish the age limit if the NBA developed a minor league system built like MLB's with each team having it's own NBDL team and any kid being drafted having an education trust built into their contract. You could have a 4 round amateur draft, fill the rosters and give all these guys who go to Europe a place to play at home if they choose. In Order not to kill the college game you can make a rule governing how many 18yr old players you are allowed to take every year. The NCAA will lose some of the top cream, but the majority of guys will school as a better way to increase their draft status. In Baseball a lot of guys choose another year of school so they can move up in the draft. So, IMHO the rule is a winner for everyone involved.  

the absurd arguments that have been put forward in support of this sorry turd of a rule.

Let's start with the idea that most high schoolers "aren't mature enough" to make the jump to the pros. Well, if that's the true intention (and I don't think it is) you might as well rename it "The Incompetent GM Full Employment Rule."

Now shouldn't it be the job of a GM - and NOT the league office - to ultimately determine whether or not a player is "mature" enough to handle the rigors of the NBA game? If I apply for a job driving a tractor trailer when my only experience has been behind the wheel of a Mini, d'ya think I'll get hired? Sure, if John Nash is in charge of personnel for the trucking firm. He just might believe that in 3 or 4 years I'll turn out to be a superstar trucker and that by hiring me early he can get me on the cheap. Never mind all those horrible smashups in the meantime...

Seriously, the idea that there needs to be a rule to keep a John Nash from drafting a Telfair or a Webster is ridiculous. Do you really think such a rule is beneficial to the player? Telfair and Webster made the choice to come out. They're 18; they're adults; they're getting paid. If their NBA careers turn out to be less than they would have been had they gone to school first, well... they can cry about it on their way to the bank. The real loser in those transactions are not the players but the John Nashes of the league who don't have the savvy to assess the player's readiness and wind up losing their job as a result.

As for the argument that the rule "helps the NCAA." Well, duh. I believe that is its actual point. More to the point is that it helps the NCAA maintain its role as the bloated cash cow at whose teat college presidents love to suckle. This, of course, is a far cry from the original intent of college athletic programs. Back in the day, colleges offered athletic scholarships as a means of access to those for whom a college eduation was otherwise unaffordable. It enabled the athletically gifted kid from the projects a ticket to the neccesary training to become a doctor, an accountant, a schoolteacher.

The notion that these scarce scholarship spots should somewhow be reserved for those who intend to use them as a stepping stone to a pro career is a grotesque perversion of the original ideal. In fact, it could reasonably be argued that letting NBA caliber high school talent jump to the pros would actually leave more of those coveted scholarships available to those who could use them for the purpose for which they were originally intended.

I was heartened to see that many of those who support the rule acknowledged that it would not be necessary if the NBA had a true minor league and not the fraudulent, half-steppin' version that is the NBDL. This is absolutely, 100% correct. Let NBA franchises use minor league teams to develop players on their own dime. Let young aspiring players of legal age the freedom to try out for those teams. Let NBA GMs assess which of those players might be talented enough to pursue a pro career. And let colleges return their athletic programs to serving those disadvantaged kids who might not be skilled enough to play pro ball but may have the skills to pursue a career in law or physics.

But, I also know that every one of you who argued in favor of the rule is a Blazer fan. So I can also understand the one argument in favor of the rule that makes a lot of sense from your perspective. As my man lyfe accurately points out, without this ill-begotten rule y'all never would have landed Oden.

"Say I am the best mini driver in the nation, but I have never driven a bigger rig.  Is it fair for me to go out in the workforce and say, someone hire me right now, as is, or pay the consequences in 3 years if I develop into the best trucker ever.  Or would it make more sense for me to go on to a trade school and prove my true value to the trucking community? Would it be out of line for someone to step in and say 'hey, slow down and work your way to the big truck, its for your own good.'"

Well, if you'll allow me to continue torturing this trucking metaphor to within an inch of its life, I'd say that of course someone should step in to tell me that I need to "work my way up to the big rig." Presumably, that person would be the hiring manager at the trucking firm. I just don't think the government needs to make a law preventing me from seeking employment as a truckdriver in the first place, as misguided a notion as it may be. If the truck company is really dazzled by my potential, they could offer to pay my way through trade school. Or I could pay for it myself. It's just downright cynical to expect the trade schools to themselves pay to develop my talent for the truck companies in exchange for the hope that I might be able to land the school a berth in some Monster Truck March Madness.

OK, enough of that. Actually, being that this is a Blazer blog, I'm not convinced that this is an entirely non-partisan issue for you guys. Is there a team in the NBA that has been more burned by drafting high school talent than Portland. From the Jermaine O'Neal debacle up through Outlaw, Telfair, and Webster. Although the jury is still out on Travis and Martell, that's still four first round picks with very little to show for them thus far.  And just to cap things off, the year the Blazers have the statistically best shot of landing the best prep player since LeBron, the league changes the rule! But no worries, Portland drops to the fourth pick in the lottery that year only to buck 5% odds next year, bouncing back to the #1 pick just when Oden is able to come out.

So, yeah, if I'm a Blazer fan I'm really liking this whole rule change thing right about now.