Obama calls for college hoops system overhaul
FORMER President Barack Obama is not a fan of one-anddone college basketball culture, where NBA prospects are forced to play one season in college before turning pro. Obama said he wants to see an NCAA overhaul and the creation of a better minor league system for basketball while speaking at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Friday. Audio of the one-hour talk was published by Libertarian site Reason.com. The former Baller-inChief took questions from Kraft Analytics CEO Jessica Gelman and Rockets GM Daryl Morey and discussed a wide array of topics from the role analytics play in politics to his time as a high school GETTY basketball player in Hawaii.
Obama was also asked if he were NBA commissioner for a day, what is one thing he would change. “This is on my mind, just because of the morning’s headlines and it’s not solely the NBA — the need to create a well-structured D-league, so that the NCAA is not serving as a farm system for the NBA with a bunch of kids who are unpaid but are under enormous financial pressure,” Obama said. “That’s just not a sustainable way of doing business. And then when everybody acts shocked that some kid from extraordinarily poor circumstances who’s got potentially 5, 10, 15 million dollars waiting for him is going to be circled by everybody in a context in which people are making billions of dollars, it’s not good. I think that ... one way of thinking about this would be what happens in baseball. Which is, if you’re Bryce Harper or Aaron Judge, then you make that jump. Even if you’re not ready for the big leagues, at least you’re going into — it is clear this is going to be your profession, you start getting paid, the organization is on the hook.”