One-and-Done Plan Not What Colleges or Pros Had in Mind

Jason Kapono? Spends one year at UCLA, averages 16 points and he’s coming out too?

Well, at least he has more game, if less athleticism, than JaRon Rush, who decided he could learn to handle the ball and shoot a jump shot in the NBA and took his tippy-toe set shot into the draft after two years in Westwood, the last one spent mostly on the shelf.

To make sense of the looney-tune world the draft has turned into, we turn--for once--to NCAA President Cedric Dempsey. Asked about NBA Commissioner David Stern’s plans to start a minor league, Dempsey replied the colleges were the NBA’s minor league and that was how it should be.

Exactly!

NCAA propaganda notwithstanding, college basketball no longer has much to do with education and amateurism, and it has been a long time since it has. It’s about money for the schools and dreams for the players, who see themselves as NBA prospects and going to class as the price of their exposure.

And if some kids in A ball or double A think they’re ready to make the jump?

In baseball these days, economics leads teams to speed prospects through their minors. In gymnastics, little girls seeking to become world class leave home before 10. Children are similarly taken away in tennis.

The difference is that NCAA basketball is a hugely profitable industry, supported by billion-dollar commitments from TV networks. It can defend itself, or at least rail in the press. Anyone who messes with Billy Packer’s livelihood hears about it, not that it has stopped the trickle of preps and underclassmen heading for the pros from becoming a flood.

So much for the morality of this issue. There is none, only competing businesses. The problem and the shame is that children are turned into little mercenaries before they’re old enough to drive, but that’s free enterprise for you.

The NBA is, as Packer says, “the enemy of basketball,” if you define “basketball” as the right of the colleges, coaches, TV networks-- and announcers such as Packer--to get rich off the sweat of unpaid, indentured servants.

The enemy of the game is everyone running the game, with a special commendation for the new class of middlemen/bandits infesting the AAU-sponsored, sneaker-company-funded summer circuit.

(That panacea the NCAA is agonizing over, paying a stipend, is a joke. With the NBA paying millions, the NCAA is going to keep players by giving them hundreds? It may surprise college coaches, but their players can count the zeros on paychecks as fast as they can. Besides, the alumni have been paying bigger stipends than those proposed since time immemorial.)

It’s a disaster for the NCAA and, despite what people think, a problem for the NBA.

Once, the draft had players like Grant Hill, who was already famous, after three trips to the Final Four. Didn’t cost Stern a penny. Now prospects are in and out of school before anyone knows their names.

And it’s bad for the kids, unless they happen to be elite-of-the-elite prospects such as Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett.

Kapono may go in the first round--but probably in the 20s, meaning he’d be on a playoff team that has expectations to live up to and veterans in rotation, and he’ll sit and watch for the next season or two.

Rush is a longshot for the first round. If he misses, he won’t have a guaranteed contract and will have to earn a spot in camp on a team that has 10-15 players who do have guarantees, or he’ll be in the CBA.

Rush and Kapono are mature adults compared to DeShawn Stevenson, an explosive 6-foot-5 high school guard from Fresno, who’s currently being pulled back and forth like a piece of taffy.

Stevenson said he’d enter the draft. Then when he got a satisfactory Scholastic Assessment Test score, he said he’d honor his mother’s wish and attend Kansas.

But when the SAT people announced they were reviewing his case, Stevenson told his high school athletic director he was going pro. His mother, Genice Popps, said her son stopped talking to her.

“DeShawn says one thing,” she told the Fresno Bee, “then he gets some information and he says something else.”

“I really hate this,” Indiana Pacer President Donnie Walsh says. “I went to [pre-draft camps at] Portsmouth and Phoenix. You’ve got AAU coaches at all the games now and all these new agents. You can feel it, it’s different. . . .

“All the people around these kids are pushing them to come out. . . . I’m a guy who thinks they should stay in school--and yet I’ve taken two high school players [Al Harrington in 1998, Jonathan Bender is 1999]. I think I do have the kind of team to do it. We could let a guy develop for two years. You take a guy with the fifth pick [Bender], most teams would need him to perform right away. . . .

“I just talked to one kid. His coach asked me to. I told him to stay in school. I had a great effect. He came right out. He didn’t even pass go. It was [Florida sophomore] Mike Miller. Came right out, two days later.”

Miller is considered a lottery pick in this draft, even if many general managers think he’s not ready either.

A year ago, Stern came up with a worthwhile plan to slow the kids down by adding a year to the rookie five-year scale for every year under 21--one for 20-year-olds, two for 19-year-olds, three for 18-year-olds.

However, the union turned thumbs down and the NCAA didn’t even return Stern’s call.

In the end, this is the grown-ups’ responsibility, not that you should expect anything. No one runs basketball. It’s a stalemated system of competing powers, warlords fighting for their turf-- Stern, the union, the agents, the NCAA, the college coaches, the AAU brokers--and none of them likes any of the others.

The kids? They’re left to take their chances.

PLAYOFFS 2000: THE BIG NOTHING

Congratulations, Laker fans, on having something to get excited about.

In most other places, however, the second round was a disaster. Here’s how it (ugh) went last week:

* Knicks vs. Heat--Luckily for Stern, his referees decided (incorrectly) to count Miami guard Anthony Carter’s soon-to-be- immortal Game 3-winning lob from behind the basket. Otherwise, after all the breaks handed to the Knicks in recent years, the other 28 teams might have seceded from the NBA on the spot. The most entertaining thing is watching brave, old Patrick Ewing lumber around, looking like a mummy. (Do they only tape that hot water bottle to his back on the bench, or does he wear it on the floor?) Miami Coach Pat Riley has his guys playing way over their outgunned heads, but he is upset that Alonzo Mourning keeps going out for dinner with Ewing and Turner analyst John Thompson. Riley, who helped break up the Magic Johnson-Isiah Thomas friendship, is thinking of telling Mourning that Ewing really likes Dikembe Mutombo better than him.

* Pacers vs. 76ers--Go figure. Milwaukee barely ousts Orlando’s nobodies to make the playoffs. Indiana barely ousts Milwaukee in the first round. Indiana then scorches Philadelphia. Reggie Miller, who looked like an aspiring retiree all season when his average dropped to 18.1, his lowest since the ‘80s, has exploded, pushing his postseason average up to 26.1.

This just in! 76ers win Game 4 and trail, 3-1. Reggie explodes with a shove to Matt Geiger’s chin that should get him suspended for Game 5. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

* Trail Blazers vs. Jazz--You knew Utah was in trouble, not only this spring but for all the springs to come, when the harder-than-hard- bitten Coach Jerry Sloan began bowing to the inevitable--after Game 1. When Portland’s Mike Dunleavy praised the Jazz players’ tenacity, Sloan replied, laughing, “Nobody cares about the past. Besides, our guys aren’t 20 years old anymore. We’re playing now with older guys. We’re an older team.”

* Lakers vs. Suns--Nice moment for Kobe Bryant, who, ironically, got less attention than ever this season, while becoming a better player than he’d ever been. However, he’s also getting excited again and slipping out of his playermaker-first mode. The Lakers aren’t defending well either, with A.C. Green and Ron Harper having trouble. The bottom line is, they aren’t as dominant as they were a month ago.

“I think the teams are closer than they [Lakers] thought,” the Suns’ Penny Hardaway said. “I’m sure Portland has a great deal of confidence, what they saw in the Sacramento series [against the Lakers], what they’ve seen in our series.”

Should the Lakers still be favored over the reawakened Trail Blazers?

Yes.

By a lot?

No.