The Rise of the G League
What's driving the professionalizing of amateur basketball?
Dear readers,
Last week, we wrote about one of our (least) favorite topics: MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. Unfortunately, we can’t blame him for the god-awful performances of our favorite teams at the moment, but we may get to that point in a few months. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
This week, we’re tackling an issue that’s a bit less black and white than Manfred’s misdeeds: the steady professionalization of youth basketball. We hope you enjoy.
-Ian and Calder
For decades, the NBA Draft has offered basketball fans a unique opportunity to watch up-and-coming stars don ill-fitting suits, hug their moms, and realize their wildest professional dreams. For the most part, the players whose names are called during the draft’s early rounds are familiar to fans who tune into the NCAA’s March Madness tournament. A handful of the same universities tend to dominate these early rounds: Duke, Kentucky, Louisville, North Carolina, UCLA, and Villanova, to name just a few.
In the past few years, though, that’s begun to change. During Thursday night’s NBA Draft, four of the top five picks weren’t college players; they were already professional athletes. The first overall pick was French phenom Victor Wembanyama, a seven-foot-tall power forward who went to the San Antonio Spurs. Most things about “Wemby” — as Wembanyama is known — are anomalous: his height, his wingspan, his uncanny ability to dribble and shoot as a seven-foot-tall big man. So it wasn’t much of a shock that he made the jump from pro ball in Europe to the NBA.
But the fact that three other top draft picks came out of pro leagues rather than college programs — Scoot Henderson, who was selected by the Portland Trail Blazers, and brothers Amen and Ausar Thompson, who went to the Houston Rockets and Detroit Pistons, respectively — should raise some eyebrows. Rather than playing in college, all three decided to go directly from high school to the G League, the primary developmental league for the NBA. In the G League, all three picks got paid to play basketball full time, rather than pretending to go to school while playing basketball for no money.
The atypical career paths of this year’s top picks reflected a broader shift that’s underway in the basketball world: more and more young players are forgoing college hoops in favor of playing in professional development programs like the G League. This shift comes at a tricky movement for college basketball and the NCAA more generally, which recently changed its rules to allow college athletes to make money off sponsorship deals and other endorsements. These deals are dramatically transforming the financial landscape of college sports, but up-and-coming NBA stars like Henderson and the Thompson brothers are still deciding to forgo the college route to focus on professional ball.
In some respects, this shift is unsurprising. There are obvious benefits to the G League: it pays its players much more than they could make through sponsorship deals in college, and it generally offers a higher level of competition than the NCAA. But even more notably, the G League — which has traditionally served as a development league for professional players who came out of college programs — is increasingly seen as the natural extension of the semi-professionalized youth basketball pipeline that players are entering at younger and younger ages.
The primary feeder of this pipeline is the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball system, which has come to dominate youth basketball in the United States in the last 10 years. In theory, AAU teams are open to any and all youth players, but in practice, it’s not exactly a Hoop Dreams sort of situation. In general, major shoe companies sponsor top AAU teams, which in turn recruit top players as young as age 10. These players tend to get on the radar of top teams either because they have a lot of money or the right last name. (ESPN, for instance, has made a habit of broadcasting AAU games featuring LeBron James’ son, Bronny.)
If it all sounds a lot like a mini-NBA, that’s because it’s meant to be. AAU basketball is modeled explicitly on professional basketball leagues, and a big source of its appeal comes from the fact that it promises players a more direct route from their local gyms to the NBA. After all, why spend years trying to attract an NBA team’s attention in high school and college basketball when you pay a couple of grand a year to have a guaranteed audience with NBA scouts at major AAU tournaments? And if you can start making a name for yourself when you’re 10 years old, why wait until you’re 15 or 16?
The more pressing question, though, is who actually benefits from the professionalization of the “amateur” youth basketball system. Sure, this system benefits a handful of players who can fast-track their leap to the NBA. But the primary beneficiary, of course, is the AAU itself.
Although the AAU is technically a tax-exempt non-profit organization, there is big money to be made from all the leagues, tournaments, clinics, and showcases that the league puts on. Before the pandemic, the organization — which has over 700,000 members across various sports — was reporting around $20 million in total revenue. Those numbers pale in comparison to the billions of dollars that professional sports leagues rake in every year, but it’s not a trivial amount of money for a non-profit entity — and AAU isn’t afraid to spend it. Back in 2011, for instance, the AAU came under fire for quietly paying its top executive $1.5 million when he stepped down amid allegations that he had sexually assaulted young athletes.
What do players get out of this lucrative setup? For most, it offers a slightly more competitive venue than high school hoops. For a very lucky few, it’s a fast track to a successful professional or college career. But at the end of the day, there are many more successful AAU players than there are spots in the NBA. And unlike (some) college basketball programs, the AAU-to-G League pipeline doesn’t provide young athletes with much of a fallback plan if their professional dreams don’t pan out. If you flame out after being a semi-professional basketball player since the age of 10, what’s left for you? (Hint: a career coaching AAU basketball.)
Unfortunately, there aren’t easy answers here. As we’re written before, NCAA basketball doesn’t exactly set young athletes on a glide path toward a happy and successful life. The G-League to NBA platform is getting more popular for a reason: young athletes are actively choosing to avoid the NCAA, which offers none of the perks of the G League but entails many of the same pitfalls.
The best outcome, in our mind, would be for the NCAA to recognize the G League for what it is: not an alternative to college basketball but a competitor — and one that’s offering players more money, better perks, and better competition. If the G League continues to draw young talent away from college basketball, the NCAA might be forced to treat its players as employees — which they are, for all intents and purposes — rather than “student-athletes.” In that situation, the G League could return to serving its traditional role as a development league for players already signed to NBA clubs, college players would be able to earn real salaries for playing college ball, and, as a result, the pressure to get kids into the semi-professional system at younger and younger ages might ease up a bit.
In the meantime, though, most young players are stuck with a system that collects millions of dollars from families in exchange for dubious promises of future fame and fortune. After NBA Draft night, when we see the luckiest of the lucky watching their dreams come true, it’s worth at least acknowledging the ones who were also sold that dream — but whose investment didn’t quite cash out.
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