The Business of Basketball

The beginning of this college basketball season has been different than past seasons. Many freshmen have emerged as stars with their respective teams and are already being talked about being drafted in the NBA. Whether its Wiggins, Randle or Parker, many NBA GMs wish the NBA draft was next week. Many other freshmen have shown they deserve to be in the league, but for now the question of who will be drafted first in the NBA draft lies within the previous three I mentioned.

 

I am a huge college basketball fan, I love watching UConn and March Madness is my favorite time of the year, but after seeing these freshmen steal the spotlight of college basketball, the rule of them having to play at least one year in the NCAA has had me thinking; why do they have that rule?

If you want to serve fries at McDonalds for the rest of your life, you do not need to go to college for a year and then apply, you just apply and serve fries. If you to have a career in accounting, you go to school for four years and get a degree in accounting and apply for accounting jobs. The beauty of having a career in playing sports is if you are good enough, you do not need a degree. People like Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker deserve to have the opportunity to go straight to the NBA. They want basketball to be their career for the rest of their life. They want to be paid to play basketball. I understand the importance of a college education and value you mine immensely, but if many of these freshmen appear the be lottery picks for the NBA then why should they have to wait when they could be playing in the NBA right now? Most likely, these student-athletes are taking the athlete side of it more seriously than the student part because they know what they want to do with the rest of their life. They want to play basketball.

Nerlens Noel is one of the reasons I believe the rule should be changed. He was a freshmen at Kentucky last year and his season ended abruptly as he tore his ACL. Noel was the favorite for the number one pick in the 2013 NBA draft before the injury and unfortunately was not picked due to injury. Although, he was still a lottery pick, he will not play any minutes this season as he is still recovering from the surgery on his ACL.

Sure, Noel is still going to be paid and he will be back next season, but what if he can never get back to full strength? He will just be a washout in the NBA and never reach his full potential because of a freak play in college. If that were to happen to Parker, Wiggins, or Randle they could miss out on the big dollars. They want to be paid the big dollars because they have the potential to alter a franchise in a few years.

If you are the best at something, you deserve to be paid extremely well. Some of the freshmen class deserve to be paid right now in the NBA. One injury can change that. These guys want to be paid to play basketball as another person wants to be paid for his or her dream job.

That injury does not only hurt the player, but it can hurt an NBA team and the NBA in general. A player that could go to the NBA from high school is an asset to the NBA.  They bring in revenue in the form or ticket sales, jersey sales, and TV ratings. If a player can never reach their full potential because of an injury in that one year of college basketball, then that hurts the alters the amount of revenue that could have been brought in by the NBA. Obviously that is revenue that goes to the respective colleges and NCAA, but for the players who only plan on staying one year, that is only one year of revenue. If a player can go straight to the NBA then that is years and year of revenue for the NBA. If he gets hurt in college, then there could be limited revenue for the NCAA and then none for the NBA.

Injuries can happen at any time and after seeing people like Greg Oden or Andrew Bynum, injuries in the NBA can also occur and alter careers. It just seems to make more sense to see these young guys achieve their highest potential while they are still young and if an injury occurs, the recovery time is much faster than someone who is older.

All these guys are looking for the paycheck that comes with playing the game they love. With that said, should they start paying NCAA athletes? Now that is just a conversation for another day.

Why Not UConn?

By Tim Fontenault (@Tim_Fontenault)

Think about the recent history of UConn basketball.

Start around the early 1990s, when Jim Calhoun’s hard work as the Huskies’ new, young coach began to show. UConn was on the cusp of a Final Four appearance almost every season, and the Huskies were a legitimate contender in the Big East Conference.

Since 1999, three national championships in four trips to the Final Four have brought pride to a state that does not have a lot of athletic achievement to boast about outside of the basketball excellence in Storrs.

The weird thing about those three championships is that only one of them was expected at the beginning of the season.

In 1999, the Huskies truly shocked the world. A lineup of Khalid El-Amin, Rip Hamilton, Kevin Freeman, Jake Voskhul and Souleymane Wane with guys like Rashmael Jones and Edmund Saunders on the bench was bound to be in the national title talk. But against a team in Duke – the team that had dominated its way to Florida with one of the greatest teams in recent memory – no one expected them to win.

In 2004, the story was different. UConn was supposed to be the dominant force in college basketball. Even an early loss to Georgia Tech didn’t dissuade many people, and the Huskies got revenge in the title game.

In November 2010, I remember sitting by a fire with Pat and a few of our friends. I looked down at my phone. “Hey dude,” I said, “we beat Michigan State!”

At that moment, we knew the team could be special. The next day, led by Kemba Walker, the Huskies beat Kentucky to win the Maui Invitational.

A few months later, they won five games in five days to win the Big East Tournament.

A few weeks after that, I saw a piano burn outside my dorm room after winning the national championship.

Anything can happen in college basketball. The top team to start the year or in the tournament doesn’t always win, see UConn of 2006, 2009 and 2012.

The Huskies are right where they should be, right in their comfort zone – No. 18 in the Associated Press Poll with two conference opponents ahead of them and picked second in the American Athletic Conference Preseason Coaches’ Poll.

This is where UConn likes to play. No one is talking about them much outside of Connecticut. Everything is Kentucky this and Andrew Wiggins that. In the AAC, they are playing in the shadow of the defending national champion, a team that returns Chane Behanan, Montrezl Harrell and the man that ESPN: The Magazine referred to this week as “Russdiculous.”

That is fine. Rankings are arbitrary. Preseason predictions are arbitrary. Analysis is sometimes arbitrary. What matters is that come mid-April, one team will stand on the podium in Dallas. One team will receive the national championship trophy from Mark Emmert.

That team could easily be UConn.

There is no denying the talent of Kentucky, Louisville, Kansas, Michigan State, Duke and Oklahoma State, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. College basketball is loaded this season. There is talent from top to nearly the bottom in every conference, including the newly-formed American.

So why not UConn? Why not a team that despite a postseason ban last season went 20-10? Why not a team that returns all of its core players? Why not a team that only got better with the addition of three talented freshmen and a transfer 1,000-point scorer? Why not a team whose coach captivated an entire fanbase by keeping to his word that his team wouldn’t take the escalator because it’s for cowards?

The 2004 Red Sox were a good team, but no one thought they were good enough to win the World Series. Throughout their run at history, pitcher Curt Schilling would ask, “Why not us?”

That is a question that will be asked across UConn Country over the next seven months.

Why not us? Why not UConn?

Well, it just might be us. After all, the men need to start putting some more banners up before the women start hogging all the rafter space.