On Thursday, New York Knicks president Phil Jackson gave yet another in a series of grim updates on the status of his “project gone awry”, hinting in the vaguest terms as to how he plans to restock the roster after what is almost sure to be the worst season in the franchise’s history.
But in between eyeballing various mock drafts and pining for shiny free agents, he also gave voice to his thoughts about what’s sure to be a serious point of contention in the next battle over the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement: the league’s rule that prohibits anyone from playing until they turned 19.
Surprisingly, given Jackson’s well-burnished and heavily self-promoted image as a non-conformist or even an iconoclastic free thinker, he’s in favor of raising it.
“When you have 19- and 20-year-old players that are coming in the league, which is what the majority of the draft picks coming into the league right now, it’s really hard to project what that player is going to be in three years, in the first contract situation,” Jackson told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne. “I think everybody would like to see [an age-limit rule] happen, everybody but the agents that are out there making the money.”
Yes, in one respect, Jackson is absolutely correct. It certainly is harder to evaluate the abilities and pro potential of a kid in high school than it is a wunderkind that’s spent a year toiling in John Calipari’s Finishing School For Highly Touted Prospects.
But saying “everybody” wants to see the rule changed? That’s downright false and patently self-serving. For starters, a great many of the “student-athletes” that are dragooned into giving away the fruits of their labor to one of the NCAA’s member schools as the March Madness megabucks roll in would like to see it removed.
Then there’s Los Angeles Clippers center DeAndre Jordan telling Dan Woike of the Orange County Register that the age limit is “the dumbest idea ever ... Why make those guys, those college phenoms, stay in college for two years? Some of our greatest players, Hall of Famers, top 50 players are going to be guys who came out of high school. Why should we put an age limit on it?”
And here you have NBPA president Chris Paul, who added, “I think you should have the option or opportunity to decide if you think you’re ready … If you feel like you’re ready, it shouldn’t be someone else’s decision.”
Want more? Michelle Roberts, the newly minted executive director of the NBPA would take serious umbrage with Jackson’s statement. In the weeks since she’s taken over the union leadership, Roberts has made her intentions with regards to the age limit crystal clear.
“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,” Roberts said in an ESPN interview. “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.”
When Jackson enlists “everybody” into his side of the issue, what he really means is the NBA owners and commissioner Adam Silver. Silver himself has repeatedly ranked changing this rule at the tippy top of his wish list, at once point fantasizing about a magic wand that would increase the limit, keeping everyone under 20 out of the league. He’s using the same script as Jackson too: “It has been our sense for a long time that our draft would be more competitive if our teams had an opportunity to see these players play an additional year.”
Who else is actually on Team Phil? Well, the NCAA, given that freeing the likes of Jahlil Okafor and Karl-Anthony Towns to go straight to the bigs would put a serious dent in the entertainment value of their product. They’d be downright giddy if Silver could somehow manage to up the period of indentured servitude by an additional two semesters.
Of course, it’s pure bunk. Any arguments in favor of increasing the age limit come down to one thing: money. Like their college brethren, the NBA sees the age limit as a financial boon. If it were upped, they’d be able to keep the likes of LeBron James and Kevin Durant under contract during a larger slice of their prime, as opposed to paying for two years of sub-peak production when they’re still too young to legally purchase a drink.
One solution would be to make a serious investment in the D-League – and player agent Arn Tellem’s plan would be a nifty start – but now you’re asking the NBA to sink even more funds into improving its product, as opposed to fobbing those costs off on the NCAA, which in turn passes the expense off to a bunch of 18-year old kids. For Silver and the owners, it’s a hell of a lot easier (and more importantly) cheaper to hammer the NBPA in 2017 with the notion that the age limit as the “responsible” thing to do, with all the smarmy paternalism and yes, the sordid racial implications that go along with it.
What’s so unexpected is that Jackson seems be buying all of this, clinging to the shaky narrative that allowing kids the right to purse available job openings has harmed the quality of play. “Once in a while you get a player like a LeBron [James] or a [Kevin] Durant, but that’s few and far between. There are a lot of kids that don’t make it that have to go back and struggle,” Jackson said.
“According to multiple studies of actual facts, however, that’s bunk. Preps-to-pros prospects and ‘one-and-done’ players have outperformed college upperclassmen at the NBA level over the years,” Dan Devine wrote at Yahoo! Sports. “There’s quite a bit of debate as to whether a sophomore year at the NCAA level is more beneficial to a player’s development than going right to the big leagues after one year.”
To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Jackson’s position. The NBA, like any other massively profitable enterprise, can and will take positions that increase their bottom line. He’s running a team now, and this is part of his job description. Coming from any other NBA front office official, it would barely merit a shrug.
But this is the Zen Master™; the shaggy-bearded spiritual seeker and serious Deadhead whose tenure on the 70’s Knicks was notable for his “experimenting with psychedelics, taking off on long motorcycle trips, reading off-beat fiction and being, well, comfortable in the nude when someone aimed a camera at him,” as Jack McCallum wrote for Sports Illustrated.
He’s goddamn hoops Yogi who was seen on 60 Minutes consecrating the sacred space that is the locker room with incense, “deliberately touched his nemesis Pat Riley, then the Knicks coach, before a crucial playoff game in order to ‘count coup,’ as the Lakota do,” got Kobe Bryant hooked on meditation, and has been enrolling the Knicks in “mindfulness training’.
His book, Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior, delves deeply into his investigation into Buddhist teachings and its application in basketball, and features Koan-ish chapter titles like, “If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball.”
It’s not that religiosity is necessarily wedded to one end of the political spectrum, but Jackson’s ethos has never felt like it lent itself fundamentalism that’s generally associated with both small and large-c Conservative thought - quite the opposite.
Make no mistake, by endorsing an increase with the age limit, Jackson is siding with power and yes, relying on tired and easily disprovable talking points in order to so. That’s what feels so disillusioning; it makes it seem as all of his talk about the game as the framework of a quest for enlightenment was just so much Pat Riley-like, Machiavellian motivational manipulation, or that he pulled a David Horowitz or succumbed to the bleak axiom: “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.”
To be clear, I don’t think that’s the case. Jackson’s spiritual quest and ongoing questions are without a doubt sincere. Nor should this in any way be read as a dismissal or even a critique of Jackson’s basketball acumen. Scores of championships, a permanent place on the NBA’s coaching Mount Rushmore, and gobs of cash is, in fact, an overwhelming stack of evidence. But when you adhere to a certain philosophy and it succeeds beyond anyone’s – even possibly Jackson’s – wildest dreams, it’s bound to make you become more dogmatic and yes, authoritarian.
Unfortunately, that seemingly includes caping for the corporate-friendly, old-school insistence that college ball benefits both the league and the players themselves. Then again, maybe the Phil Jackson that’s a part of management had more than one meaning in mind when he wrote the final line of his most recent tome, Eleven Rings: “The soul of success is surrendering to what is.”
