Speaking (well, writing) selfishly, although I respect Jabari Parker for considering a return to Duke, I'm glad he's going pro. I'm gonna enjoy watching the draft this year. Wiggins, Parker, Embiid, Exum....
Smart decision. No sense leaving all that guaranteed money on the table and risking having his next year's draft value plummet.
Really well written. No honest coach would try to coax his player out of an automatic top-5 pick in the draft. Nothing was different in this case. I do think there may be an argument for some players, particularly point guards slated to go in the back half of the first round, to stay in college longer to hone their skills. Those guys tend to peak later and require more playing time, homework, and positive reinforcement before everything suddenly "clicks". For everybody else, the right move is to bolt for the NBA as soon as you think you have maximized your draft ranking. Careers are too short to sacrifice the earnings potential from that second contract. If the NBA wants to forestall such a motivation, it should set the age at which you can get a second contract to be earlier the later you stay in college. But then NBA teams would immediately catch onto this and penalize NCAA upperclassmen even more, because they would have less control over them. There's not a good answer here. Perhaps make the rookie wage scale a little higher, as in, the opposite of what the NFL did around 2008? I always felt like baseball and basketball had almost a sort of indentured servitude with regards to their young talent. Flame out before the second contract and that's that. But if you increased the rookie wage scale, then teams would prioritize second round picks and undrafted players even more since they would be able to qualify for minimum contracts. Other GM's would start copying Morey and his Parsons-style contracts for second rounders. Everything has an intended and unintended consequence I suppose.
If you look around the league, teams have been doing this with second rounders for several years now. Hell, the Kings did that with Isaiah Thomas, even though he was the 60th (and very last) pick of the draft! And lucky for them they did, since they got this past season out of him (in which he put up some pretty strong numbers) for peanuts rather than having to pay him big bucks or even possibly lose him to another team via an Arenas Rule contract. The 3- or 4-year deals for second rounders (and even undrafted free agents) using cap room or the MLE are actually fairly commonplace in today's NBA.
So sad that they will most likely lose him this offseason because the owner doesn't want to go into the luxury tax for a 28 win team. That is what a team gets when it agrees to pay Cousins and Gay 43 million next year.
