Age Limits Are Unrealistic

There has been recent talk on ESPN.com (in J.A. Adande’s chat and Henry Abbott’s blog) regarding the NBA’s age limit, which is currently set at 19. Points have been made that many of the primary MVP candidates – Kobe, Bron, Garnett – were high school-to-NBA guys. As are Dwight Howard, Amare Stoudemire, Tracy McGrady, Jermaine O’Neal and Monta Ellis, all successful NBAers. Of course, there are plenty of high schoolers who never came close to meeting their NBA expectations, including Korleone Young, Jonathan Bender and even Darius Miles.

At the same time, there are many college-tested players, like Adam Morrison, J.J. Redick and Sheldon Williams, who haven’t reached anywhere near the same level of success in the NBA as they did in college.

I’ve argued amongst friends that age limits in any profession, including professional basketball, are unnecessarily restrictive. It is unfair and unrealistic to protect people from failure. Certain people are built to succeed and others to fail in every segment of life. A guy like Kwame Brown may not have been better served by going to college. Perhaps his innate immaturity and lack of awareness would have been detrimental to his college development, thus stifling his NBA potential and possibly preventing him from earning millions of dollars. Maybe he actually recognized this and decided to take the millions once he could get them. In that sense, he is at least smart enough to be a capitalist.

Guys like Kevin Garnett or LeBron James or Kobe Bryant were built to withstand the pressure of professional sports stardom. They had the physical maturity to cope with the long, taxing NBA seasons, the emotional maturity (for the most part) to deal with the extreme optimism and pessimism they faced and the work ethic to realize their development as a player was just beginning as they entered the NBA.

There are guys like Greg Oden or Michael Beasley who could have made The Jump. Their time and earning potential shouldn’t have been compromised with the façade of them going to class and actually caring about school. Their space in classrooms and attention from professors and teaching assistants should have been given to more “normal” people who literally have to go to school to land a job.

But with David Stern stating in a recent interview that he would like to increase the age limit to 20, it looks like this unrealistic rule will be instituted well into the future.