Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution

by Jonathan Abrams

  It was not. Instead, it was a rule agreed to by the union that represented NBA players. O’Neal was one of the few players who had taken the route from high school to the NBA to argue against an age minimum. “That’s actually kind of the surprising thing,” recalled Pat Garrity, a former NBA player and a member of the union’s executive committee, a panel of players charged with acting in the interests of the players as a whole during the negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement. Garrity did not recall many active players arguing that high school players should be allowed to join their ranks. The players believed in the right of choice—and also in their right to make as much money as possible. The negotiations worked as a give-and-take bartering between the assemblage of lawyers maintained by the league and the players and Stern and Hunter. The importance of allowing high school players into the league fell somewhere below the fight to maintain the length of maximum player contracts and the sizes of annual raises. The league and the union found middle ground on several issues. The new deal lowered the maximum length of contracts from seven to six seasons and dropped the cap on annual raises. Stern accepted the 19-year-old age minimum, instead of his preferred 20-year-old minimum.

  The choice was simple when everyone involved in the negotiations looked at the alternatives. At the time, Michael Curry was the president of the players union. He was a member of the Indiana Pacers and not a basketball prodigy, like most of the kids who had come straight into the NBA. Curry went undrafted after spending his college years at Georgia Southern and doing stints in basketball’s minor league rungs and abroad in Italy and Spain. But he played hard-nosed defense and became a respectable veteran for several teams in an NBA career that spanned close to a decade. “It’s a hard thing to do, try and satisfy 450 [players] because you have 450 guys who are CEOs of their own corporations,” Curry said. “What if we didn’t have guaranteed contracts and someone came out and got injured? You give yourself up when you’re part of a group. But the guys that have not gotten to the NBA yet, they haven’t become part of the group. I’ve heard all the sayings and people are absolutely right. If you go fight for your country at eighteen, can’t you come into the NBA? They probably could if we didn’t have guaranteed contracts. When you have a union and you make decisions, you give that up, but what we kept was more important.”

  After four days of intense negotiations, the sides announced the new deal in San Antonio before Game 6 of the NBA Finals between the Spurs and the Detroit Pistons, with the age minimum almost serving as an afterthought. The mandate was only briefly touched on when Hunter and Stern addressed the media in late June 2005. “Well, we have been negotiating rather intently for a period of time,” Hunter said, gazing into the sea of reporters through his glasses. “I guess the two of us needed to ratchet up the rhetoric and we decided it was time to back away from the abyss and decide if we could really do a deal. What we did, we ended up spending about fourteen hours together last Friday, and we said, if we’re going to be able to do it, now is the time. Otherwise, we know what the end result is going to be. So our president, Curry, came in, along with Antonio Davis and Pat Garrity from the players’ side. We sat there along with David and forty owners and staff, and after about fourteen hours, we kind of moved closer and closer until we thought we had a framework for the deal.” A reporter asked Stern if he believed the age minimum would legally prevail if challenged in court, in light of the recent suit filed by football’s Maurice Clarett, challenging the NFL’s early eligibility rules. The reporter’s second question dealt with whether the rule change was aimed at removing NBA personnel from high school gymnasiums.

  Sonny Vaccaro was one of the few who challenged the new rule immediately, telling the New York Daily News: “I thought Stern did what any head of a company does. He did everything he could for his owners and he basically had to give up nothing. It was one of the most one-sided negotiations I’ve ever seen in my life. The fact it lasted five seconds was a joke.”

  The questions veered toward other issues. In 2013, NBA players ousted Hunter from his executive role. Hunter had received complaints of nepotism because he employed several family members in the players union. His discharge was the result of a fractious fallout with Derek Fisher, a veteran player who had ascended to president of the union. Fisher initiated an outside review of the association’s finances. The review found that Hunter had spent more than $100,000 on gifts for other executive committee members and had received $1.3 million for unused vacation time. Hunter recently said that he still believes the age minimum is financially motivated and inclusion into the NBA should be merit-based. “It’s all about dollars,” he said. “Because we knew that if a kid comes out early, then he’s going to have an opportunity to make a lot more money than by the time he’s put in his first two or three years [in college].

  “The reality is that the rookies don’t displace anybody because you’re going to have thirty players coming and thirty players leaving no matter what,” he continued in the spring of 2013. “So what they end up doing, they end up really displacing some college players who might’ve gotten drafted at a higher level or end up maybe not getting drafted at all because they’ve been displaced by a high school player coming in.”

  The Toronto Raptors prepared to play the Lakers in Los Angeles a few days later. Amir Johnson, then a member of the Raptors, laughed when recalling the moment he found out he had been drafted into the NBA. When the Pistons made Johnson the final high school player drafted with one of the second round’s final picks just one week after the announcement of the age minimum, he could not rise off the couch to celebrate. Johnson, a pillar of a teen, had grown up in East Los Angeles and had pledged to play at the University of Louisville under Rick Pitino. He was so committed to Louisville that he had visited the dorm room where he planned to live, as Moses Malone had done at Maryland decades earlier. But a couple of impressive workouts changed his mind and he felt he could compete in the NBA. Eight other high school players had already been selected in that draft, beginning with Portland’s pick of Seattle’s Martell Webster with the sixth overall selection. Still, a current of electricity ran through Johnson’s body when he heard his name called. But he could not move. “I was over at my auntie’s house,” Johnson explained. “We were all watching on the leather couch, no plastic. She had just taken the plastic off. When I got drafted I was stuck to the couch. I couldn’t get up.”

  As a rookie, he had as much to learn off the court as on it. Johnson joined a deep and veteran-laden Pistons team, the same organization where Korleone Young had failed as a novice high schooler years earlier. Johnson played in just three games his rookie season, while bouncing back and forth between the Pistons and the NBA Development League. He was wise to have a support system around him. Johnson’s mother, Deneen Griffin, moved in with him. A teammate, Antonio McDyess, bought Johnson his first suit. “Even though I really couldn’t fit it at all because it was kind of big on me,” Johnson said. And then there was the whole challenge of being able to afford a decent car, but not possessing a driver’s license. “When I learned how to drive, it was tough, especially in Detroit because it was snowing out there,” Johnson said. “I learned how to drive in the snow, the Michigan U-turn, how to pump your brakes, a bunch of stuff.”

  The qualities that separated Johnson from others who failed are clear. Johnson was not playing with the Pistons, so he asked to be demoted to the minors to gain some playing time. He tried staying away from the nightlife. He asked questions and listened to the answers. Having the distinction of being the last high school player drafted into the NBA holds little weight with Johnson. He said he was more content that he is still in the NBA now, having established himself in Toronto’s frontcourt for years before signing with the Boston Celtics in the summer of 2015. “That’s why I usually tell younger kids, if you really want to go to that next level, you have to work hard and put in that dedication, sacrifices, and the first thing is to get your schoolwork done,” Johnson said. “You can�
�t rely on basketball because it’s not [usually] going to happen. You usually see players that just rely on it and not make it and go overseas.”

  •••

  The NBA’s prep-to-pro movement crested on the court in the 2009 NBA Finals between the Lakers and the Orlando Magic. By then, the league had banned high schoolers from entering the league years before. But players who had already made the jump piloted teams across the league. That finals pitted two stars in Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard, players on opposite ends of the prep-to-pro spectrum. Bryant was part of the first wave of players who declared from high school and had already earned every NBA accolade imaginable. Howard, drafted first overall in 2004, was an athletic freak of a rim rattler who had ascended as one of the final NBA stars to have passed on college.

  The Magic had seriously debated whether to use that first selection on Howard or Emeka Okafor, an All-American and a national championship winner from the University of Connecticut. Howard seemed grounded. His father worked as a Georgia state trooper. His mother taught at the tiny Christian school he had attended since the age of four. Only 13 members comprised Howard’s graduating class. Howard seemed like a marketer’s dream and routinely discussed bringing God into the NBA and placing a cross on the NBA’s logo. “He was so raw, but had a good foundation,” recalled Dave Twardzik, Orlando’s director of player personnel at the time of the draft. “His father was a policeman and his mother was a tremendous influence in his life and he seemed to be really attached to his family. Not to say that Okafor was not, but with Dwight, we were very impressed with that, plus the upside to his game was tremendous in our eyes.”

  His upside included a frame that was nearly 7 feet tall and 250 pounds—a man’s body. He started immediately as a power forward in Orlando. Johnny Davis, his first Magic coach, brought him along slowly and Howard had an immediate impact on games through his athleticism and defensive ability. Howard had fun on the court and developed into one of the league’s premier inside forces. He led Orlando in blitzing through the 2009 playoffs and defeated LeBron James and Cleveland in the Eastern Conference Finals. But the Lakers topped Orlando in five games for Bryant’s fourth championship and his first without Shaquille O’Neal as a teammate.

  Soon after, Howard’s polite image changed. News outlets reported that he had fathered several children out of wedlock, contrary to the Christian image he had cultivated. He forced his way out of Orlando through a trade to the Lakers in 2012 that involved Andrew Bynum, another prep-to-pro All-Star, being dealt from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, Howard’s play was limited as he recovered from back surgery and he and Bryant never coalesced as teammates. Howard always played with a grin, while Bryant took the court with a constant scowl. “What surprises me the most about his career is I never thought, not in a million years, that he would ever be portrayed as a villain publicly,” Johnny Davis said of Howard. “I hear things about him now and I say, ‘That’s not the same Dwight Howard that I know.’ I just can’t believe the way that he’s portrayed at times and I think it’s unfair. I don’t think the young man is as bad as people say.”

  In the summer of 2013, Howard left the Lakers and signed with the Houston Rockets. “The things that he excelled at in his rookie year are still the things that are on his calling card,” Davis said. “That’s rebounding, blocking shots, being tough around the basket. He really hasn’t shown a tremendous amount of growth in terms of offensive skills, but he’s still viable down there. It’s not like you can just let him shoot. You have to contest the shot. That’s the area [where] he really didn’t make a whole lot of progress, from what I can see. I thought he would at this point be a much better free-throw shooter. I also thought that by this point in his career, a team would be able to throw him the ball and feel very comfortable. I don’t know if that’s the case.”

  •••

  The NBA’s headquarters are located inside Manhattan’s Olympic Tower. The offices span several high floors in Midtown East and sit atop people hustling from one destination to another deep down below. Stern shunned his suit’s jacket as he sat down with a journalist and Mike Bass, the league’s executive vice president of communications, at a large conference table. His retirement would be official in a few short months. In recent days, comments originating from the collegiate ranks had irked Stern. He made little effort to hide his disdain and mentioned them floating in the news before the interview with the reporter had really begun. “Did you see [NCAA president Mark] Emmert had some remarks this week?” he asked. The NBA’s relationship with college basketball had once been symbiotic. The NCAA had served as a feeder system to the NBA. Players like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and many others first gained popularity and fame in college before carrying their names and reputations to the NBA. The age minimum changed all that. It created an influx of college players who otherwise would have entered the NBA out of high school. Instead, they spent a few months on a college campus before opting for professionalism afterward. College represented little more than a pit stop on the way to the NBA. They became known as “one-and-done players.” Players like Kevin Durant were already NBA-caliber players and were instead instructed to make a short detour on the way to the NBA. “I guess they were trying to look at having a lot of kids coming into the league that really weren’t ready or even mature,” said Greg Oden, who played a season at Ohio State during the rule’s first year of enforcement. “I definitely think it helped out that way. But there are some kids that are good enough to go. Kevin Durant would have been good enough to go.” The better collegiate programs no longer carried stability or name recognition from one year to the next. The days of a Tim Duncan or a Shane Battier incubating for four years in college belonged to a different era. Emmert and Larry Scott, the commissioner of the Pac-12, had said that the NBA should allow players to come into its league out of high school or mandate that players stay in college for two or three years—establishing a system similar to the one that baseball employs. “It’s a dynamic tension that we really need to work on because it’s at the heart of part of what we’re talking about here,” Emmert said during a speech at Marquette University. “Why would we want to force someone to go to school when they really don’t want to be there? But if you’re going to come to us, you’re going to be a student.” Scott, speaking at the Pac-12 football media day in 2013, said, “Anyone that’s serious about the collegiate model and the words student-athlete can’t feel very good about what’s happening in basketball with one-and-done student-athletes.” At one point, Stern had worked for more sensible proposals. He once proposed an insurance plan that the NBA and the NCAA would pay into that would protect the top 50 or so college basketball players should one suffer a debilitating injury before entering the professional ranks. NCAA officials responded that insuring the top prospects would violate its rules of amateurism. “They said, ‘Our rules require that you do that for all sports,’ ” Stern said. “We couldn’t limit it to just basketball. I said, ‘OK, I get it’…So the labyrinth of rules in the NCAA is off the charts, off the charts.”

  Stern settled into his chair. “I’m not sure how to react to Emmert’s comments,” he said. “I don’t want to get into an epic confrontation.” He took a moment. Stern reasoned that schools should not accept players who only planned to be on campus for a short time. The NCAA had a choice in establishing its own rules, just as the NBA did. “I think what really happens is those players ultimately get their credits in some online heaven,” Stern said. “Online university in the sky, without having gone to classes, OK? So the hypocrisy lies with the schools, not with the league. I mean, Scott, those guys are in la-la land. No university president is going to say, ‘All right, we’re not going to have all these’…they call them one-and-done. It’s very easy, don’t have them. But then their alumni would [stop donating to the programs]. It’s sort of like, to me, the professionals here are the purists. The amateurs are the hypocrites. The argument that—and just to go to the hardest part, because after th
irty years I still can’t articulate it exactly right—everybody gets a chance to set standards for employment. The New York Times says we want you to have experience as a journalist and maybe even a graduate degree in journalism.”