Originally Posted by
FellowTraveler
In addition to the problem you raise, Kerr's argument has a variety of others.
Kerr’s assessment of straight-to-the-NBA guys like Garnett is flawed. He compares the rookie seasons of Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan to those of Garnett, Kobe, Howard & LeBron, concluding Garnett & Bryant “needed the extra playing time” they would’ve gotten in college to develop and “LeBron and Howard were thrust into unfair positions as saviors of lottery teams, and after seeing how their careers have unfolded, maybe those burdens affected them more than we realized.”
This is the wrong way of looking assessing the situation.
If the question is “what’s best for Kevin Garnett’s development, going straight to the NBA or going to college?,”* looking at his rookie stats tells us nearly nothing, as we don’t know what they would’ve been had he gone to college. Kerr tries to use rookie seasons of college-goers Bird, Johnson & Jordan as proxies, but this is nonsense. Instead, Kerr should look later at Garnett’s career.
Take Bird for example. Larry Bird at age 23 after three years in college put up a 20.5 PER and 11.2 Win Shares. Kerr compares that to Garnett’s 15.8 PER & 4.4 Win Shares as a 19 year old after zero years in college, and concludes that Garnett would’ve been better served going to college. What Kerr should do instead is look at Garnett at a comparable point in his own journey. Doing so, we see that Garnett at age 21 with two NBA seasons behind him put up a 20.4 PER and 9.6 Win Shares, which compares well with Bird at 23 with three years of college behind him. And Garnett's career from then on compares favorably to Bird’s.
It isn’t exactly a great insight to note that a 23 year old player with three years of college experience outperformed a 19 year old straight out of high school. And it tells us nothing about which path (college vs. NBA) is better for a player’s development -- it merely suggests that having three extra years of development time is better than not having them. Hardly groundbreaking stuff, and not at all relevant to an assessment of whether those three years would be better spent in college or the NBA.
Finally, Kerr suggests -- and I’ve seen this suggested elsewhere in this debate -- that Garnett and Bryant weren’t ready for the NBA and should’ve gone to college. But they were both, at 18/19 years old, league-average players. That’s really good! (For comparison: Garnett’s 15.8 rookie PER was better than the PERs of all but 5 of this year’s rookies, all of whom -- obviously -- are older and more experienced than he was.) Both made second-team all-Rookie team. I would contend that if you’re capable of being an average NBA at 19 years old, you’re ready (from a basketball standpoint) for the League. And both went on to have inner-circle Hall of Fame careers. So it’s awfully hard to buy the notion that their longterm development was stunted.
Though Kerr suggests the players would’ve been better served by developing in college, his piece is really written from the perspective of the league, so his broader point is that it isn’t in the league’s interest to pay for development that could occur on someone else’s dime, and that the quality of basketball in the league would be higher if it didn’t have still-developing teenagers dragging it down. But Bryant, Garnett, James and Howard are terrible examples that undermine his point: All four were league-average or better performers as rookies. That means their presence in the league didn’t lower the quality of play -- it raised the quality of play, assuming teams behaved rationally and gave them PT at the expense of below-average players.