Don’t blame system for freak injury

OK. LET’S start with this at the top: The NBA rule forbidding players from joining the league out of high school is abhorrent. There is no good reason a player good enough to play in the NBA cannot join it when he is 18. Former commissioner David Stern might have had noble stated intentions when he birthed that legislation almost 15 years ago — ridding high school gyms of pro scouts, making secondary and tertiary talents take pause before taking the leap.

But the collateral damage has been significant. Players still forfeit their college eligibility before they should. One-and-dones have damaged the quality of play at the upper echelon of college basketball, which hurts that level of the sport and also damages the NBA, which has to strip so many players of bad habits picked up in those one-year cameos.

So we can all probably agree on this: If Zion Williamson wanted to jump to the NBA straight out of Spartanburg (S.C.) Day School, he should have been allowed. But for now that world doesn’t exist.

In the world that does, when Williamson went down on the floor at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Wednesday night, his sneaker blowing out and his knee spraining, the entire sport of college basketball found itself immediately under siege. Within seconds, some of Zion’s future colleagues in the NBA took to Twitter, and a lot of them had the same theme:

Kid could have blown out his leg playing for free.

Part of the outcry is understandable because all of the hypocrisies of college sports were on display: There was a full house on the Duke campus (including Barack Obama), and some of those spectators had paid as much as $3,000 for tickets on the secondary market. There was a large TV audience, and those games aren’t broadcast for free, as a public service. Looking on were a couple of coaches, Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams, who between them earn well north of $10 million in annual salary.

And the kid who limped off plays for room, board and the love of the game. In theory, anyway.

So the hand-wringing was inevitable.

And yes: There are things about college basketball that need to be fixed, and simply allowing would-be freshmen back into the league wouldn’t solve all those problems. But since the mood of the day is to brand college basketball as a whole an outdated societal evil, allow me to serve for a moment as the game’s humble public defender.

For one thing: It wasn’t the college game that asked for this. I suspect if you give truth serum to all the coaches who have taken advantage of the one-and-done rule — and not just Krzyzewski, but John Calipari, too — they would agree their game was better in the old days, when players stayed four years and rivalries were allowed to grow over time.

Williamson was a global sensation before he ever signed a letter of intent. If all he truly cared about was maximizing his income, he could have played a year in the G-League — or in that junior league run by LaVar Ball — and still collected millions from a shoe company as he bided his time. Or he could have gone to Europe. Or, as the Knicks’ Mitchell Robinson did last year, he simply could have spent the year training for the 2019 draft.

Ah, but there’s the catch: Playing for Duke is a better experience — a far better experience — than any of those things, even at his present salary. See, this isn’t a zero-sum game. It is possible to believe the NCAA exploits its army of free talent … and it is also possible to acknowledge that playing at Duke — first-class hotels on the road, chartered jets, full arenas everywhere you play and, yes, a pretty fair education for as long as you decide to stay — beats a string of bus trips, Red Roof Inns, Taco Bell drive-throughs and crazy coaches yelling at you in foreign languages.

The very best players do have options. That most of them opt for a detour, however brief, at Duke, Kentucky, Kansas or LSU just reminds you that while it may make you feel good to liken them to indentured servants, that isn’t entirely accurate either.