I'm against any age restriction. You're good enough and dunking on everyone at 14? Lace em up.
Heres the thing though, would you like to be the one paying Millions of dollars to the 14 year old, and hoping it ends up as a good investment? These rules allow the league to protect themselves from having to make that decision, and allow them to limit their risk.
In my opinion, the market and philosophy of the GM should dictate what kind of a contract that kid gets.
Agree to disagree. I personally think when you don't have regulations on a market like that, it becomes a slippery slope, and suddenly teams need to sign kids younger and younger in order to get anyone with any sort of talent. And I think that would ultimately kill the economics of the league, because they will have way too much money and roster spaces in young projects that are nowhere near producing at the NBA level.
Now, I absolutely think these kids have the right to make money playing basketball, I just think it is bad business for the NBA to be the place, based on the way the current CBA is constructed, and particularly that they don't have a true minor league.
With certain tweaks to the system, it could certainly work, but based on the system now, I just don't think it works.
You're ignoring the role of market leaders.
That's probably because I have no clue what your talking about. Please elaborate.
Essentially a good organization steps up and publicly takes a stand. There's more than one way to do it. For example, I guarantee if Mac comes out with a great computer tomorrow for $700 you'd see instant responses from its competitors, because a standard gets set.
Otherwise everything would always just degenerate to the lowest common denominator.
I don't believe these doom and gloom scenarios of the league ruining itself with willing employees being matched up with willing employers.
Well, I am not talking about the league ruining itself. I am talking about them losing money, and then being forced to pass those losses on to the consumer, or more likely just correcting it in the next CBA (just like they did by putting in the age limit in the first place after enough teams got burned by highschool kids and young Euros).
Of course the other thing that could happen would be a major backlash against highschool kids, and suddenly these kids would no longer be drafted because they would be seen as too much of a risk, and a lot of them would be left inneligible for college, but without a job in the NBA either.
They put the age limit in for a reason. The influx of highschool kids (which was absolutely a slippery slope), was getting worse and worse. It was hurting teams financially, because there was too much pressure to draft them, and they were expending way too much money to try to develop them without enough payback.