It Remains an Age-Old Question for the NBA

First, let’s get the terms right. Jermaine O’Neal never called anyone a racist.

Didn’t use the r-word at all, in fact. It was added parenthetically to his comments about the NBA’s desire to institute a 20-year-old minimum age requirement for the draft.

“As a black guy, you kind of think [race is] the reason why it’s coming up,” O’Neal said Monday night, the Indianapolis Star reported. “You don’t hear about it in baseball or hockey. To say you have to be 20, 21 to get in the league, it’s unconstitutional. If I can go to the U.S. Army and fight the war at 18, why can’t you play basketball for 48 minutes and then go home?”

And so a heaping teaspoon of race was added to the mix on this turbulent topic. It can’t be ignored, because O’Neal is right.

We’re not even having this discussion about hockey or baseball or golf or tennis or acting or singing or anything else. It’s only basketball and football, sports with a majority of African Americans at the pro level.

That doesn’t mean that the leaders of the NBA and NFL are racists. And the reason the NFL’s three-years-after-high-school rule held up in court is because the union agrees with it, and the only way the NBA will adopt an age limit is if the union signs off on it in the new collective bargaining agreement. The heads of the NFL and NBA unions are black.

But that also doesn’t mean there is no racial component to this. The only reason NBA Commissioner David Stern even has to address this is because there’s so much societal pressure to do so. It’s as if people can’t handle the sight of young black men getting millions right after they return their prom tuxedos to the rental shop. Meanwhile there’s no movement to stop child entertainers.

Teenagers joining the league is not the problem with the NBA. Ask the Cleveland Cavaliers and Phoenix Suns where they’d be without LeBron James and Amare Stoudemire, each of whom went from high school to rookie of the year. Or guess how many fewer championship banners would be hanging in Staples Center if the Lakers hadn’t drafted a 19-year-old Magic Johnson in 1979 and acquired a 17-year-old Kobe Bryant in 1996.

Drafting teenagers can be a problem for general managers who don’t do their homework and get seduced by talent, size and youth. If GMs think high school players are too great a risk, then don’t take them. But don’t deny a chance to the next LeBron just to avoid drafting the next Kwame Brown.

And don’t think that a side benefit of an NBA age limit would be a deeper talent pool for college basketball. Look at the court and notice the approaching double team of a stronger NBA minor league and tougher penalties for academic shortcomings in the NCAA, and you’ll see the person getting squeezed is the college player.

Stern says he wants to expand the National Basketball Development League into a true farm system.

In an interview Wednesday, NBA Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik said, “I think it’s something that can be done. I think we recognize, in order to have an affiliation system that makes some sense, we have to ultimately build up the number of teams in the NBDL, and we’ve made some strides toward that recently. What we’d like to see is a situation that, at least if you’d have a young player that we drafted and wasn’t getting time to prove himself, that he could be sent to a D-league team.

“The only issue, is his development better served sitting on the end of the bench or playing every day in the Development League?”

If they’re going to have the kids in the professional minor league, then why have the 20-year-old requirement in the first place?

“There’s other reasons why we would like to see an age limitation,” Granik said. “One of the problems that exists for our teams is having to make draft decisions on players who have never played anywhere but high school ball.”

He alluded to the number of summer camps and Amateur Athletic Union tournaments NBA executives have to attend.

“We’d prefer that he was able to avoid that dilemma to begin with,” Granik said. “That’s one reason why we’d like to see a higher age limitation.”

Which sounds as if it’s more of a concern for the league than the players. Meanwhile, NBA fans could miss out on moments such as a Shaun Livingston over-the-shoulder pass or a Josh Smith ode-to-Dominique dunk while the players are competing for the Roanoke Dazzle or the Columbus Riverdragons.

What about going to college? That might not always be an option with the impending Academic Progress Rate and Graduation Success Rate policies that kick in for the NCAA this fall. In short, teams can lose a scholarship if an athlete on aid doesn’t stay eligible and stay in school for each term. And teams can be ineligible for postseason play if they don’t meet a score that’s the equivalent of a 50% graduation rate over a six-year time frame.

The problem is, some of the best basketball players come from the neighborhoods with the worst schools. So maybe the talented player whose life might have benefited from even the slightest exposure to a college environment would be passed over if he was considered too risky. Even a 25% graduation rate sounds better than 0% if you’re talking about underprivileged kids, but the college presidents are too afraid of how the raw numbers look.

And once again, it’s difficult to ignore an issue that affects African Americans, who make up the majority of Division I basketball players, being decided by an overwhelmingly white group.

Of the list of the top 50 college basketball power brokers that ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during the Final Four weekend, only five were African American. There were 19 white men and a computer (representing the Ratings Percentage Index) before the first black man, Nike basketball global marketing director and former USC coach George Raveling, made the list. Would some of these same decisions be made if they disproportionately affected their communities?

No one -- including Jermaine O’Neal -- would say this is racism. But no one should be naive enough to believe race isn’t a factor.