The job of the NBA commissioner on draft night has gotten more stressful over the years. His little spiel for each pick used to be easy: “With the [X] pick in the [year] NBA draft, the [team] selects [player] from [college].” Then, prospects started coming out of high school. Sometimes former commissioner David Stern felt the need to list a high school’s name and location—Kwame Brown was “from Glynn Academy in Brunswick, Georgia”—and sometimes Stern skipped naming the high school entirely, as in “the Cleveland Cavaliers select LeBron James.” Players also started coming from overseas, and the league never quite figured out whether to announce a player’s nationality (Darko Milicic was simply “from Serbia and Montenegro”), hometown (Dirk Nowitzki was “from Wurzburg, Germany”), or hometown, home country, and foreign playing history (Nikoloz Tskitishvili was “from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Benetton Treviso of the Italian League”). 

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Today, ID’ing a draftee is more complicated than ever. Some of the top prospects come from overseas. Some are from America but first go overseas to play professionally before entering the NBA draft. Some come from foreign countries but move to America to play college basketball. Some prepare for the pros by participating in developmental leagues specifically designed to provide a pathway to the NBA that bypasses college. When announcing LaMelo Ball—who played first in Lithuania, then in a shoddily run vanity league founded by his noisy dad where every team was called “the Ballers,” and finally in a New Zealand–based team in Australia’s National Basketball League—commissioner Adam Silver simply said that Ball was “from Chino Hills, California.” Silver is more loquacious when celebrating the successes of the NBA’s various ventures that develop players for its own league: Last year, Silver introduced Dyson Daniels as hailing from “Bendigo, Australia, the NBA’s Global Academy in Australia, and the NBA G League’s Team Ignite.” 

These draft announcements are both complex and politically fraught. Thursday night, Silver will have to announce Amen and Ausar Thompson, a pair of identical twins who grew up in California, went to high school in Florida, then left high school early to become the first two stars of a startup league called Overtime Elite. Specifically, they played for the City Reaperz, an OTE team that went 21-1 and won the league championship. Will Silver announce their hometown? The location of their high school? Their made-up-sounding team name? Will he state the league they played in, openly acknowledging a startup clearly built to rival the NBA’s own player development system?

When the NBA banned players from coming directly from high school starting with the 2006 draft, it gave college basketball a spectacular gift, essentially forcing the next generation of stars to first spend at least one year playing college hoops. And over the past 20 years, the NCAA has squandered that gift, creating an environment where college basketball is no longer the most effective pathway for elite prospects to reach the NBA. Just look at the 2023 draft class.

The top pick in the 2023 NBA draft will surely be Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 French prospect with the wingspan of a condor and the hype of a GOAT. He’ll be followed shortly by the Thompson twins—apologies to the 1980s pop band; your SEO is doomed—and Scoot Henderson, who played for G League Ignite. 

Between Wembanyana, Henderson, and the Thompsons, four of the top five expected picks did not play college basketball. That hasn’t happened since 2001, when the top four picks came directly from high school or from overseas. And it will likely be the first draft since 2002 when none of the top 10 picks played in the Final Four—the only Final Four participant in the first round of Kevin O’Connor’s final mock draft for The Ringer is UConn’s Jordan Hawkins, and he’s all the way down at no. 20. None of last year’s consensus first-team All-Americans are likely lottery picks—the highest ranked of those five players is Indiana’s Trayce Jackson-Davis, who will potentially fall out of the first round at no. 29. The top of the draft board is filled with players who played on teams that missed the men’s NCAA tournament (like UCF’s Taylor Hendricks), failed to lead their team in scoring (like Arkansas’s Anthony Black and Nick Smith Jr.), or played on teams that missed the men’s NCAA tournament and failed to lead their team in scoring (like Michigan’s Kobe Bufkin and Jett Howard and Villanova’s Cam Whitmore). Long story short: College basketball success has never mattered less for NBA draft stock.

The only top pick that was one of the best players of the 2022-23 college basketball season is Brandon Miller—and Miller’s lone season at Alabama often felt like a microcosm of everything wrong with college sports, as the Crimson Tide continued to play Miller after he provided his teammate with a gun reportedly used to kill a woman. Miller has not been charged with any crimes, and The Athletic’s David Aldridge reported that the NBA teams that have spoken to Miller about the incident were “satisfied with Miller’s explanation.”

The incentive structures in college basketball and in the new developmental leagues are entirely different. The end goal of a college hoops program is to win games, generate ticket revenue, and bring in donations from big-money boosters. The G League Ignite team, which launched in 2020 as a developmental program within the broader G League, doesn’t have a fan base to appease and doesn’t need to win now; boosters will not call for the heads of coaches if they fail to make the G League playoffs. (The Ignite team went 11-21 this year.) It doesn’t even need to make money. The NBA is happy to invest in developing future stars. (OTE does need to make money since it’s an independent business, but its plan for doing this seems to be heavily marketing the Thompson twins, who both have more Instagram followers than most male college basketball players.)

It’s hard to compare a college basketball star’s situation to a G Leaguer’s and feel like the college player is getting the better end of things. The college player has to go to class and has limited practice time due to NCAA regulations, while the G Leaguer is a full-time athlete. The college athlete has to play games against questionable opponents to ensure a good record for the NCAA tournament, while the G Leaguer plays against professional athletes. The college player can’t be paid a salary, while the G League does pay competitively to attract top talent. 

A few years ago, it was reasonable to wonder whether these upstart developmental leagues could improve a player’s draft stock. We seem to have an answer to that question by now. Jalen Green, who became the first lottery pick out of the Ignite program when he went no. 2 in 2021, has come along just fine, making the NBA All-Rookie First Team in his first year in the league and averaging 22 points per game this past season. G League Ignite alum Jonathan Kuminga, the no. 7 pick in 2021, contributed to the Warriors’ title run in 2022, although he wasn’t exactly the first (or second, or third, or fourth) option for Golden State. It’s a path players seem likely to continue to take: The top prospect in the high school class of 2023, Ron Holland, will play for Ignite. 

I don’t know what college basketball is supposed to offer an NBA prospect to convince him to spend a year or two in college rather than joining the G League or OTE. College basketball programs can’t offer more money, don’t offer significant developmental advantages, and don’t guarantee better draft status or pro success. (I’d say college basketball offers an educational advantage, but OTE has been aggressive about marketing the educational opportunities it offers to players, some of whom accept scholarships rather than cash to preserve their amateur status.) The NCAA has allowed players to accept name, image, and likeness payments, which is a step in the right direction—but instead of accepting that as a clear positive for college sports, the leaders of college athletics seem mired in a battle to impose restrictions on NIL to ensure it isn’t abused. (They seem to equate “abuse” with “young athletes receiving money to play sports.”) 

College basketball needs to figure out what value it offers elite draft prospects and work to maximize it—not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is a sport at risk of withering away. How much longer will fan interest remain as college basketball becomes less and less meaningful for developing pro prospects?

G League Ignite and OTE have one main goal: Get Silver to say the names of their prospects on draft night. And it feels like we’ll be hearing the names of fewer and fewer college programs going forward.

Rodger Sherman