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Players union lawyer on NBA draft age limit: 'If they were white ... they would be out there playing'

Players union lawyer on NBA draft age limit: 'If they were white ... they would be out there playing'

Ever since he took the reins of the NBA from David Stern on Feb. 1, 2014, Commissioner Adam Silver has identified raising the minimum age at which a prospect can enter the NBA draft as one of his top priorities. The National Basketball Player's Association seems eager to fight if he pushes for it.

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The current rule — which has been in place since 2005, when the players' union agreed to bar future high-schoolers from entering the draft in exchange for some financial concessions more beneficial to players who were already in the league — prevents a player from playing in the NBA until he's been eligible for at least one draft. In order to be eligible, you must be at least 19 during the calendar year in which that draft takes place; if you're an American-born prospect, you have to be at least one year removed from high school.

Silver wants to increase it to 20, arguing that an "additional year of maturity" for players would improve the overall quality of the NBA game. He really wants to — like, if you gave him a magic wand and told him he could push through any one project or initiative, he'd go with raising the age. He said the same thing to Chuck Klosterman in November and to a gaggle of reporters at Barclays Center during All-Star Weekend. He's been clearly, consistent and constant on this issue.

So, too, has been the new-look leadership of NBPA. Union president Chris Paul thinks "you should have the option or opportunity to decide if you think you’re ready" to enter the NBA before you're 20. Executive director Michele Roberts is "adamantly opposed" to the minimum, calling it "just another device that serves to limit a players' ability to make a living."

"Be happy with one-and-done," Roberts said during an All-Star Weekend press conference rejecting Silver's "cap-smoothing" proposal. "It's not going to be two and done."

Speaking at a sports law conference in Miami on Thursday, the NBPA's general counsel used some awfully strong language to emphasize the union's opposition to not just raising the age limit, but the limit's very existence. From Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press:

National Basketball Players Association general counsel Gary Kohlman said "quite likely the union will be taking a radically different position" than the NBA on the age issue, which will almost certainly be a contentious point between the sides when they sit down in the future.

"If they were white and hockey players they would be out there playing. If they were white and baseball players they would be out there playing," Kohlman said. "Because most of them are actually African-American and are in a sport and precluded from doing it, they have to go into this absurd world of playing for one year.

"That's just total complete hypocrisy." [...]

"Capitalism means that if you're 17, 18 years old and you're a geek and you want to drop out of college and invent Apple or something else, you can do it," Kohlman said. "In this country you can do that. And there's nothing stopping you from doing it. If you're an unbelievable blues singer at 17, 18, 19 years old, you can go out and make a fortune."

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Kohlman isn't the first to suggest a racial bias — or, at least, a disproportionate impact on African-American athletes — in the NBA's institution of a post-high-school age limit.

After the eligibility change went into effect in 2005, Jermaine O'Neal — whom the Portland Trail Blazers drafted out of high school in 1996 and who developed into a perennial All-Star with the Indiana Pacers — discussed the rule in very similar terms: "If you sit down and you ask the majority of all the black basketball players, you say, 'Why do you think there's so much talk about basketball players coming out at a young age, and there's no more talk how hockey and other sports have been doing it for years, decades?'"

Four years later, U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., called the one-and-done system "a vestige of slavery" that had no place in a free society: "There’s something wrong with keeping kids, who are more likely to be African-American than not, from playing professional basketball and football when they can help their families and communities immediately."

While Roberts herself hasn't evoked the racial underpinnings of this schism, she shared a similar philosophical rebuke during her famously bombastic chat with ESPN the Magazine' Pablo S. Torre:

"It doesn't make sense to me that you're suddenly eligible and ready to make money when you're 20, but not when you're 19, not when you're 18," she said. "I suspect that the association will agree that this is not going to be one that they will agree to easily. There is no other profession that says that you're old enough to die but not old enough to work."

There are, of course, counter-arguments.

Both Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League boast far stronger, more bona-fide minor-league player development systems than the NBA has in the D-League, in which even top performers only earn about $30,000 per season and which currently includes only 18 teams, including one — the Fort Wayne Mad Ants — that serves as an affiliate for 13 NBA teams. (The other 17 have one-to-one direct relationships with NBA franchises.) Teens drafted by MLB and NHL franchises typically spend multiple years at the lower developmental levels before reaching the top flight. That's not the case in the NBA.

Also, while it didn't happen under the current leadership's watch, the existing age limit was collectively bargained by a prior iteration of the union:

Plus, as former player Grant Hill noted in the same 2005 New York Times story in which O'Neal raised his objections to the age limit, it can be argued that this is what a union's supposed to do:

"I always thought that it was the purpose of the union to protect its members, not potential members," said Hill, a 10-year veteran. "I think if anyone gets left out, it's the older players, guys who put equity into this league, card-carrying members paying their dues to the union. I would hope they would be protected."

(One would suspect similar sentiments laid beneath the support for raising the limit to 20 expressed by Tracy McGrady and Shawn Marion, two aging former stars who now live on the fringes — and, in T-Mac's case out of — the NBA.)

Interest in the increas to 20 goes back, at least, to 2009, when Stern began claiming that turning one-and-dones into two-and-dones so would increase the maturity level of incoming pros, give young players more opportunities to hone their skills and afford NBA teams more time to scout prospects. This, in theory, would reduce the incidence of draft busts, especially among high-lottery selections. (Lots of people have called bull on that, as has some compelling research into draft history.) The topic was just one of many contested issues during the 2011 negotiations, but was eventually tabled for a later date in the interest of drawing an end to the labor conflict and ensuring that a 2011-12 season could proceed.

Wherever you stand on the issue itself, comments like those by Silver, Roberts and Kohlman make it clear that, when the league or players can (and inevitably do) opt out of the current CBA in the summer of 2017, the limit will go from an ancillary system issue to one of the primary topics of negotiation.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

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