EPTOn April 13 2005 22:10 Servolisk wrote:
No, since high school kids still have a higher proportion of success (atleast if you don't include high school aged foreign players, I don't really have these numbers on hand). It isn't as if there aren't college busts either. For every Grant Hill there is a Christian Laettner. There are a lot of college stars that can't play in the NBA. Two of the fab-five didn't even make it to the NBA...
No, since high school kids still have a higher proportion of success (atleast if you don't include high school aged foreign players, I don't really have these numbers on hand). It isn't as if there aren't college busts either. For every Grant Hill there is a Christian Laettner. There are a lot of college stars that can't play in the NBA. Two of the fab-five didn't even make it to the NBA...
By that logic, every high school player from the St. Vincent-St. Mary's high school squad should come out of HS directly into the NBA. (all of them who have declared have succeeded) You can't compare the talent level of those players who come straight from high school with the talent level of EVERY college player. What you have to compare is the prospects for a given player or group of players on the two options: 1) coming out of HS versus 2) going to college.
We can debate whether Jermaine O'Neal would have been better off going to college, but it's still ridiculous to take one of the minority of high-school declarees who has become an all-star in the NBA as a "garden-variety case"; it's treating a relative outlier as the norm. What you can't really debate is that those people who didn't get drafted would DEFINITELY have had better results going to college.
And of course, no one has mentioned that college is still, you know, a place where you learn stuff. At least some NBA players still take advantage of that...
