The age minimum (surprisingly) boosted Williamson’s stock, while NBA Draft lottery reform made the tank-off for his services less obnoxious
Zion Williamson’s extraordinary and brief college career is almost assuredly over. The megastar’s Duke Blue Devils lost in the Elite Eight on Sunday, and one expects that the player overwhelmingly favored to go No. 1 in June’s 2019 NBA Draft will soon declare the end of his days in Durham.
Williamson has essentially been an NBA character for years now, since his high school dunk Vines became legion on the basketball internet going back three years. Now as he prepares to finally become an NBA player, it’s worth looking at how intertwined his career has become with the league’s complicated policy battles.
Williamson, of course, would not be at Duke if not for the NBA age minimum instituted in 2006. Williamson had an enormous level of fame for a high school and AAU athlete before committing to Duke. He had exactly the profile of the type of player who, before the age minimum was foisted upon 18-year-old prospects, would jump straight to the pros out of high school. These days, he fit the profile of a one-and-done star: someone who spends six months or so on a college campus essentially auditioning for NBA teams.
Williamson’s audition went incredibly well. In fact, in a weird twist of fate, despite being among the most famous high school basketball players of this era, His NBA stock was actually helped by his year in college. Williamson wasn’t actually the consensus No. 1 player in his recruiting class: Duke teammate R.J. Barrett was more consistently rated higher, and Duke teammate Cam Reddish was in the mix with Williamson on most rankings. (Yes, Duke pulled the top three recruits and didn’t make the Final Four.)
The story of the NBA’s age minimum is that it hasn’t really helped a whole lot of players build fame or their NBA bonafides. But for Williamson, it really did. He would have been a top-five pick straight out of high school and, thanks to a massive social media following and extraordinarily bankable playing style, he would have signed a substantial sneaker deal regardless. Yet a season at Duke turned him into a household name among even more casual basketball fans (not just the very online) and built the endorsement case even stronger.
This — Williamson becoming the best case for the value of the age minimum in the 13-year reign of the rule — comes as the NBA prepares to end the rule and allow players to go straight from high school to the pros again. How ironic.
The NBA, cowing to pressure from, uh, Condoleezza Rice and the NCAA, has declared it will roll back the age minimum circa 2022 or so, likely replacing it with some sort of complicated rule that limits preps-to-pros players to LeBronian (and Zionian) star-level recruits, blocking the Lou Williamses and Monta Ellises of the world. Within a few years, chances are players like Williamson — bombastic, famous high school/AAU stars — won’t ever even be in college basketball.
The other controversial NBA policy Williamson’s brief Duke career intersects with is draft lottery reform.
As teams became a little too enamored with using the draft to build a talent infrastructure, the NBA worked to decrease the incentive to lose. It took time to convince enough NBA franchise owners of the need and to water down reform enough to allow it to pass, but it did so a couple years ago. It’s finally in place this season.
Instead of the worst team in the league — your New York Knicks— having a 25 percent shot at landing Williamson, the worst three teams (Knicks, Suns, and Cavaliers as of April 1) each hold at 14 percent shot at No. 1. There are still some advantages to being the worst team in the league (such as being unable to fall lower than No. 5, whereas the second-worst team can end up at No. 6) but these are minor compared to maximizing the probability of having the first pick.
Given how dominant and marketable Williamson has looked this season, and given how bad the worst NBA teams are, how insufferable and embarrassing would the annual tankathon have been without lottery reform? Can you imagine the depths the Knicks and Suns would have plumbed if this was a fight for something like dibs on Williamson instead of a mutual descent into the darkness.
Teams tank regardless of the quality of the projected No. 1 pick. But looking at this level of generational talent, you have to imagine that if the incentives hadn’t been adjusted the way they were, things would have become even uglier than usual.
Lottery reform happened just in the nick of time in that sense, though one could argue the NBA watched a gross rock fight for a generational talent last year too, only two teams then passed on said generational talent despite winning the No. 1 and 2 picks.
The age minimum and lottery process are integral and so consequential to the fate of NBA teams, and really impact decisions made years in advance. And they are all about getting megatalents like Williamson into the NBA. It’s interesting to look closely at how those players end up intersecting with the policies when all is said and done.