Here's Wednesday's Dear Gary ...
Dear Gary: Brandon Jennings should go straight to Europe and do what he loves and enjoys doing -- playing basketball and entertaining the fans. This NBA age-limit rule should be illegal considering young adults can go pro in golf, tennis, ice-skating, soccer, etc., and make a living doing what they enjoy.
-- Thomas
You're preaching to the choir, Thomas, though I don't know whether the NBA's rule that prevents high school players from going straight to the league like LeBron James, Kendrick Perkins and many others once did should be illegal, exactly. I'm not a lawyer and couldn't possibly speak to that with any sort of intelligence. But if you want me to tell you the rule is wrong and that it was put in place for wrong reasons, well, I've told you that many times and have no problem telling you again.
The rule is wrong.
I mean, I loved watching Kevin Durant and Michael Beasley play in college. But those guys didn't belong in college any more than John Lennon or Scarlett Johansson or Tiger Woods belonged in college. And if nobody has a problem with musicians and actors and golfers skipping-out on an education if they are clearly talented enough to get somebody to pay them millions without it, I can't understand why anybody has a problem with basketball players doing the same thing -- except for that we love our college basketball teams in a way that we don't love our college bands, drama clubs and golf teams.
In other words, when a great basketball player skips college it hurts somebody's favorite college basketball team. That's why people care so much. But that's no reason to try to force people who don't want to be in college into college. And so if Jennings is the first guy who flips the bird to the NBA and shows them he's going to get paid for being great at his age even though the NBA tried to make it difficult for him, well, more power to him, and I wish him luck.
