5) It's a lot better then the NCAA. Bender's team would absolutely destroy Villanova. The average age of players on his team is 29. They may not all be NBA level but they would crush the 19 and 20 year old college kids. You give the NCCA too much credit. only 60 players get drafted and the are 64 teams in the National tournament. That means the best players from each of the best college teams can't all go to the NBA. Also, second round picks for the most part do nothing in the NBA and half of the first round really can't work into the rotation, so that means you have about 20 NBA ready kids playing in the NCAA at any given year.
Yep. Only 60 player get drafted, and not all of those are from the NCAA. More and more, a large chunk are coming from outside the NCAA. DraftExpress currently projects 15 of 60 that won't have played in the NCAA -- and that includes 7 in the first round. When you look further, and consider that typically only about 40 of the 60 players will even make rosters, that means that only about 30 NCAA kids each year will make rosters. And probably only 20 of those will truly 'stick' to have long term NBA careers. There are roughly 1000-1200 basketball 'students' in each year's recruiting class. That puts the percentage of NCAA schoolboys that are actually likely good enough to have an NBA career at somewhere under 3%.
Some of the others -- a couple hundred, probably, or around 20% -- will be good enough players to be able to get contracts with other pro leagues like ACB, IBSL, CBA, etc. These guys, when older, become the level of competition that Bender has been playing with.
The rest (about 75-80%) will probably never play any sort of pro ball.