Coming soon to an NBA arena near you.
Rim-rattling dunks. Back-breaking threes. Teams battling for a playoff spot with only a few games to play. And I got to sit courtside. Utah looked like they might be in danger of giving the game away toward the end, but the home crowd refused to let them lose as they pulled away to beat Idaho, 123-115.
Wait, Idaho?
That’s right, the Idaho Stampede of the NBA Developmental League. They lost a close one to the Utah Flash, affiliate team of the Utah Jazz and Atlanta Hawks of the NBA. Utah played a great game – better fundamentally than any college game I’ve seen all month – in front of about a reported crowd of 3,287. I was there, though, and I’d be surprised if it topped 1,000 people at any given time.
That’s a shame, because I think the D-League might be one of the best-kept secrets in sports. The game was fantastic, and the tickets were cheap. As a member of the media, I got to sit courtside, but my wife was there too, and she sat about six rows behind me for an $8 ticket. Try finding something like that at an NBA game.
So why don’t more people come? To be honest, it’s probably the stigma of a “minor” league. And that’s fair. There’s a reason D-Leaguers aren’t playing in the NBA. These guys are good, but they still make mistakes. The game was played on a college court, and I caught more than one player spotting up behind the wrong three-point line. The game was chippy (five technical fouls!), which is the sort of thing that experience can clean up. While it’s still a professional league, it’s not the NBA. It’s closer to AAA baseball – a solid product, but maybe a little disappointing if you’re expecting Major League.
But is that what we ought to be expecting? I wouldn’t go to a minor league baseball game expecting to see talent like Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Howard, or Troy Tulowitzki. I would expect to see promising young talent that could develop into a major-league caliber player in a couple of years. Not every player coming through the D-League is going to become Dwight Howard.
After the game, I got a chance to talk to Utah head coach Brad Jones. I asked him what sort of players he’s trying to build up on his team, and his answer was enlightening:
“We’re not looking for LeBron James. We’re not looking for Kobe Bryant. We’re looking for Louis Amundson. We’re looking for Anthony Tolliver. We’re looking for C.J. Watson, the kind of guy that can get 12th man minutes, then maybe work his way up to 9th man, then maybe someday be a starter.”
We’re so used to the “win now” mentality in professional sports that sometimes it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the long term. While D-League players are all very talented, there’s a reason they’re not in the NBA. These are guys who would struggle to earn minutes off the bench. Considering the Flash’s parent teams are the Jazz and the Hawks, two teams fighting for high playoff seeds in the NBA, it’s doubtful they would see any minutes at all if called up. But in the D-League, they get heavy minutes and earn valuable experience. In the case of Utah and Idaho, the experience is doubly useful – they’re fighting for a playoff spot, and get to learn what it’s like to play under that sort of pressure. If they get the call to come up to the NBA, that sort of experience will be invaluable. Even though they’ll be rookies, they can play like seasoned veterans.
At least, that’s the goal. While the D-League is the “official minor league of the NBA,” the league’s collective bargaining agreement is vague at best when it comes to their relationship. While parent teams are free to option their players down to D-League teams and call them up when they want to, non-allocation players can be called up at any time by any team. For instance, when the Portland Trail Blazers were dealing with major injury problems earlier this year (at one point, they had so few healthy players that head coach Nate McMillan suited up so they could play a scrimmage; he ended up injuring his Achilles tendon), they signed Anthony Tolliver from their affiliate team, the Idaho Stampede. When he didn’t work out well for them, they sent him back to the D-League, where he was quickly picked up by the Golden State Warriors, who have no affiliation with Idaho.
Ideally, each NBA team would have its own affiliate team where they could send young talent to mature and gain valuable playing time instead of rotting on the bench. They also wouldn’t have to worry about talent being poached by other teams. That might come with the new CBA next year. For now, we’re still working on improving the image of the D-League. When Hasheem Thabeet, the #2 pick in the 2009 draft, was optioned to the Dakota Wizards in Feburary, many people viewed it as a demotion and an embarrassment. Thabeet made the most of his time, and when he was recalled in March, he posted dramatically improved numbers.
Thabeet isn’t the only D-Leaguer to make it big. Tolliver is starting for the Warriors now and putting up huge stats. Sundiata Gaines was called up from Idaho to the Jazz and hit a buzzer-beating three to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in just his fifth game. Louis Amundson, the 2006 D-League Rookie of the Year, is earning big minutes with the Phoenix Suns, currently battling for home-court advantage in the playoffs. It’s clear these guys can play.
And it’s clear you should be watching. The regular season ends this Sunday. The playoffs start soon after. Chances are excellent there’s a team near where you live. So do yourself a favor and look into it. It may be the best-kept secret in sports, but there’s no reason it has to remain so.
The NBA and the players’ association should include the D-League’s role in their upcoming talks. Eliminate “one-and-done” college players for something more like what Thabeet has experienced:
A raw prospect is drafted out of H.S. and spends a year or two in the D-League. He plays in the US, with NBA regulations (not NCAA or FIBA), against better opponents (few colleges have 2+ NBA prospects), more frequently, and is trained and coached under the direction of his NBA team.
(This would also make the D-League more marketable, as happened for Dakota.)
The kicker would be money… D-League salaries are miserable (topping out at something like $30k). International money will be much better.
That said, there haven’t been a lot of players going overseas right out of high school—they recognize the benefit of doing a year of college to boost their draft stock stateside.
True about the $$.
The NBA as a whole should shudder at the thought of a “Euro Year” trend, even as individual teams are interested in the services of a player with professional experience. Brandon Jennings chose a $3.5M year in Rome rather than an unpaid* year in college, and came out a lottery pick. Not everyone will follow suit just yet, but interested players and interested teams will find each other.