Bob Knight: The NBA has ‘raped’ college basketball

Bob Knight is not a fan of the current one-and-done system in college basketball.

In fact, the Hall of Fame coach and ESPN analyst apparently hates the rule that allows players to bolt for the NBA just one year after high school so much that he compared it to one of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

“The NBA does a tremendous, gigantic disservice to college basketball,” Knight said Tuesday on ESPN Radio’s “Mike and Mike” show. “It’s as though they’ve raped college basketball in my opinion.”

It’s not the first time Knight has used the word “rape” in a way-too-casual manner. In a 1988 interview, he was discussing how to handle stress when he said, “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

In the aftermath of that comment, Knight defended himself by saying, “The word rape can be used in several ways.”

Apparently he still feels the same way.

Here’s Knight’s entire quote from Tuesday:

“If I were involved with the NBA I wouldn’t want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid, to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I’ve been watching on another team and now he’s 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid. On top of it all, the NBA does a tremendous, gigantic disservice to college basketball. It’s as though they’ve raped college basketball in my opinion.

“Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they’ll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I’m sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.”