NBA

NBA teams welcome new draft-status rule

Once a risky but mandatory task, the scouting of prep players will fall by the wayside.

By STEPHEN F. HOLDER
Published June 26, 2006

For every Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady and LeBron James, there is a Leon Smith, Korleone Young and James Lang - prep projects who didn't pan out.

People such as Ernie Grunfeld have the unenviable task of determining which is which. But after 29 years of involvement in the NBA as a player, coach and executive, even Grunfeld found it difficult to accurately scout players jumping to the NBA from high school.

"We have to do what we have to do," said Grunfeld, president of basketball operations for the Washington Wizards. "But obviously, when you draft a high school player, the potential and upside is what you're looking at. It hardly ever happens that a high school player is going to come right in and help you. LeBron, Kobe, Kevin Garnett, those are the exceptions, and they are very, very few and far between.

"At the end of the day, it's a crapshoot."

With team's fortunes and the reputations of those in front offices riding partly on the draft, NBA executives mostly welcomed the league's newlyimplemented rule that requires draft candidates be at least 19 and one year removed from high school.

That means neither Greg Oden nor Kevin Durant, two high school big men who are sure to have scouts salivating one day, will be available in Wednesday's draft. And if James were graduating from high school this year, even he would be on his way to college - if you can fathom that possibility.

There is no consensus on whether the players are entitled to a shot at the NBA, though legal experts tend to side with the league because the rule was put in place with the union's blessing. But there is little disagreement among executives that the new rules will make the high-stakes draft process less stressful for talent evaluators because it will require less guesswork.

"It has nothing to do with the rights of the players to be here," said Donnie Walsh, Indiana Pacers president. "That's another issue. From the standpoint of the agreement that was made, it's better for us because I think it will help us if these young guys get more coaching and (grow) a year older. And it takes us out of the high school gyms. In many cases, there were guys who had talent, but it's such a long way from the raw talent to where they need to be that it gets to be a guessing game. You make mistakes."

Now, NBA assistant director of scouting Ryan Blake predicts "the margin of error will be smaller." Blake and his father, director of scouting Marty Blake, saw the problems created by the old rules on a daily basis. NBA scouting is a global undertaking, with Europe, Asia, South America and Africa among the frontiers being scoured by the league's scouts.

Add to that the hundreds of college prospects who must be seen and the task seems overwhelming. By the time the handful of high school prospects were thrown into the mix, with all the challenges that come with scouting them, it reached the point of impossible. What's more, the task of scouting high schoolers was made more problematic because of the level of competition they faced.

"You're dealing with guys who are playing against players who, for the most part, aren't even going to be Division I players," Blake said. "It's not great competition."

Take the Magic's Dwight Howard and the Suns' Amare Stoudemire. At 6-11 (Howard) and 6-10 (Stoudemire), their high school competition was almost always undersized. In the NBA, they would face players of similar size on a nightly basis.

"Then (some of) these players have agents who aren't letting them work out," Blake said. "That scares you."

One problem that routinely cropped up under the old system was kids making ill-advised decisions to enter the draft. It is one of the primary reasons commissioner David Stern embarked on his mission to implement a minimum age.

There was Smith, a first-round pick in 1999 who was out of the league in less than two years; Lang, a second-round pick in 2003, never set foot on an NBA floor; Young, picked in the second round in 1998, played in three games in one NBA season. There are other examples of players who entered the draft but weren't picked, eventually falling off the map and into basketball oblivion.

A trickle-down effect of prep players being scouted was the inevitable feeling that, if they're watching me, they must want me. Hardly.

"Sometimes kids were led to believe that if NBA people are in the stands watching me, I must be good enough," Blake said. "Just because they show up doesn't mean they're going to take a chance on the guy. But as the years went by, teams had to go because they had to know about the kids and because all the other teams were doing it."

Time will tell whether the new system works, but for those making the picks: This is a sweeping success.

"For the kids, there's no guarantee for them. They may go to college and not even succeed, so I would never question a kid's choice," said Danny Ainge, Celtics director of basketball operations. "But ideally, for the rest of us, it makes our jobs a lot easier."

[Last modified June 26, 2006, 01:44:16]