Why does the NBA STILL not have a true minor league system? I would LOVE to watch projects like Tacko develop in the system and hopefully come up to the big leagues. Especially with the league lowering the draft age requirement.
The are slowly moving towards it. One issue has been that not all of the NBA teams have a matching G-League affiliate. Until they all do, they can't move the rules too heavily in favor of that model versus the current dependency on the NCAA.
But the trend is for more and more NBA teams to have an affiliate relationship with a G-League team (like the Cs have with the Red Claws). And they've slowly but surely strengthened that relationship and adjusted the rules to make it more of a development option than it used to be.
It wasn't that long ago that they could barely ever send a young, end-of-the-bench player to the G-League to get minutes. Now, they can send them as much as they need to for the kid's first three seasons. It used to be that G-League salaries were barely competitive with flipping burgers at a McDs. Now, the basic G-League contract is at least a living wage and if a player gets a 10-day call-up he can make very good cash. And a 2-way contract can net a player anywhere from 75K to just under 300K (with an option to get converted to a full NBA minimum contract).
There is still a lot more needed to be done, but it's moving in the right direction.
Heck, the Celtics are actually in process to _buy_ the Red Claws, so they will own that team going forward.