The advent of NIL and the transfer portal have undoubtedly blown the collective mind of college basketball. And they’ve given NBA evaluators something to think about, as well.
Previous scouting will now give way to the draft combine, individual workouts and showcases to further inform decisions. Amid all of this, league types have been wondering, too, what effects NIL and the transfer portal will have on prospects — more mentally than physically.
“You have to wonder what a guy is all about after he’s been through all this,” one league executive told Heavy Sports. “Once you know a guy can play, you have to figure out where his head is at and whether he’s going to dig in and work to develop his game.
“You wonder about that when you hear the stories about talking with other schools during the season about transferring and how the money is affecting the teams they’re on now. It’s great that these guys are finally getting to share in the wealth, but you’re wary of players that get used to looking for a quick way out as soon as the smallest bad things happen.”
Said another NBA personnel staffer, “Put it this way: you’re doing a lot more digging on what a guy is really like. You need more intel from people around him, because you’re not going to be able to tell just from when you sit down to interview the guy. By that point, these kids have been coached by their agents to say all the right things.”
‘If You’re a $1 Million Player in the College NIL, You Should Be in the Draft Category’
Far from being against NIL, people from the league hope it gets lucrative enough to keep more players in school.
“The bigger and longer the resume, the greater the chance we’ll have a real assessment of where they are in the pecking order of the draft class,” a front office source told Heavy. “The shorter the resume, the better the chance for a huge mistake. So all of us would prefer to see guys more, not less, because our jobs depend on making good assessments, and you’re better off making assessments with more information.”
Presently, however, if a player is advised that he’ll make an NBA roster, the projected minimum salary or more than $1.2 million will be enough to draw him from campus.
“If you’re a million-dollar player in college NIL, you should be in the draft category,” the source said. “If a college is paying you a million dollars and you’re not a draftable guy, then the college is making a big mistake.
“But there isn’t the pressure to jump to the pros now if you aren’t ready, because you can make good money and help your family while you’re boosting your draft stock for the next year.”
But for the people who are ready to make an immediate impact, the NBA wants at them as soon as possible — with a caveat.
“Take Luka Doncic,” said a basketball ops veteran. “Would I rather have Luka at 22 or at 18 or 19? Well, if I have him at 18 or 19, I have him for three or four more years.
“The problem is that everyone’s not Luka — and you can’t standardize the time it takes a player to develop. Some guys can’t handle it emotionally or psychologically, and they just drop off the map after a couple of years and you never hear from them again. Some guys have the right mindset, but it may take them a few years to develop physically and skill-wise.”
And the issue isn’t always with the player. Sometimes it’s an NBA mindset problem.
“Take the one-and-done,” he said of players spending just a single season with a school before hitting the league. “After a while, we started to make the exception the rule. That’s essentially what we’ve done. So the best player in college basketball has got to be a one-and-done guy. At one point, that was the exception.
“What gets forgotten is really how many times it hasn’t panned out. The Canadian kid from Vegas, Anthony Bennett. Complete flame-out. The problem is we really don’t know from year to year and young man to young man who has got all of the elements within that package of skills and attributes and is able to make that transition to the NBA and do it seamlessly or easily. It’s different every year, because it’s a different person every year.”
‘The Only People Who Have Lost as Much as the NCAA Has Lost in Court Are the Washington Generals’
Throw into all this the concept of young hoopers going from empty pockets in high school to deep six-figure NIL deals.
“You’ve got grown-ass men in the NBA having locker room issues because of money and ‘why is this guy making more than me?’ And now you take that same process and throw it down to 17-18-19-year-olds,” said a person with coaching and personnel experience. “That invites the same type of issues, only with less control and less maturity.
“One of the favorite stories in the NBA is you have a guy making $8 million, and at the end of the shot clock he gets a pass from a guy making $25 million dollars. He’s like, ‘Don’t throw me that grenade. They don’t pay me to make that shot. They pay you to make that shot.’
“It’s like that in college now, too, only it’s not just about situations like that. It’s guys saying, ‘Hey, man, why don’t you buy us some pizza. You got that money. Buy us some pizza.’ It’s across the board. And at some point, you wonder if it plays into a guy’s level of trust.”
One longtime college scout told Heavy about a player (name and school withheld) who got big NIL money and bought himself a Mercedes. He asked one of the coaches if he could park the car at his home away from campus and leave it there. “He said, ‘I’ll get around campus with my bike and school transportation.’ He was sensitive to the fact that he and another guy took up almost all of the NIL money,” said the scout. “He didn’t want to be riding around campus in a big Mercedes while the rest of the team were just like regular college students. He’d come out to the coach’s house to get it if he was going somewhere on break, but otherwise he left it there.
“That’s a good move by that young man, but it’s not something we ever had to worry about before.”
He added, “I don’t think coaches have a real problem with players getting paid. What they have an issue with is the NCAA’s inability to organize the portal into a reasonable process. The portal is really open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, because there’s constant tampering going on. The tampering is not only with players, it’s with coaches and assistant coaches. There just are no rules. So people are going to fill ‘no rules’ with behavior that may be less than ethical.”
Said a league exec, “The NCAA dragged its feet, which is how we got to this point. And it’s still dragging its feet, because it’s afraid to implement any minimum standards.
“The only people who have lost as much as the NCAA has lost in court are the Washington Generals. Like, they lose all the time, and it’s because they kept trying to build a firewall against the idea that athletes should be paid anything for their services while they, the NCAA, was willing to reap all the windfall from those services.
“For those of us who have been critics of the NCAA over the years, this is everything we thought it would be, in terms of the clusterf*** it’s become.”
