Between Josh Huestis and Emmanuel Mudiay, a squeeze is coming for college basketball

When Josh Huestis was drafted by the Oklahoma City Thunder, I was ... well, amused. And snarky.

It’s not that I have anything against Huestis — he was a fine player for Stanford, the sort of big wing miscast as a power forward we see fairly often in the college ranks, and even if I didn’t think highly of Stanford (“Stanford can’t beat Kansas anyway,” I wrote), I thought both Huestis and Dwight Powell, eventually drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers, had pro futures.

I didn’t expect Huestis to go in the first round, though, and I wasn’t sure his name would be called at all on the night of the NBA Draft. And neither were his agents, according to what they told SB Nation’s Mike Prada. So they struck a deal with the Thunder that seems likely to allow Huestis to be “stashed” on the roster of OKC’s D-League affiliate for a year, essentially shifting the start date for the Thunder’s commitment to paying Huestis his guaranteed NBA minimum salary and keeping him on an NBA roster to the moment when they call him up to the bigs.

The Thunder get a player they can keep tabs on locally — that D-League affiliate is moving from Tulsa to Oklahoma City — at a bargain price instead of a player who wouldn’t have helped them much in 2014-15 anyway, and Huestis gets a guaranteed spot with a contending team, something he would not have gotten had he slipped into the second round or out of the draft entirely.

It’s an ingenious move, to be sure, so much so that Tom Ziller rightly notes that it’s something the NBA should probably stop the Thunder from doing, if only because finding a loophole that would allow a team to pay a player a tiny fraction of what he is due as a draft pick — a deal giving him 100 percent of his rookie scale would earn Huestis $918,000 for a year’s work with the Oklahoma City Thunder, but he would make around $25,000 with the Oklahoma City 66ers — seems like a gross violation of the spirit of draft guarantees, and maybe the rules that create them.

And I’m fully with Ziller on that point: The NBA’s efforts to establish the D-League as a viable minor league ought not to include piddling $25,000 salaries for any player, not when the NBA is a multi-billion dollar enterprise about to negotiate a deal for more billions in TV revenue.

But I also wonder what this deal — and the NBA’s effort to make the D-League a fully fledged minor league — might mean for college basketball. And I fear it’s not particularly good for the sport of basketball on either end.

There were already many good reasons for leaving college basketball for the professional ranks before running out of eligibility, most notably the prospect of making actual money, instead of free room and board (but not, until this coming academic year, snacks) and tuition, to do much of the same work that is done in a college basketball program. That reason probably factored into the early NBA Draft entries of Missouri’s Jabari Brown, Arizona State’s Jahii Carson and North Carolina’s James Michael McAdoo, to name three players who scored 14 or more points per game in the 2013-14 season, yet still went undrafted.

And if the loophole presented by OKC’s Huestis gambit stays open, agents will absolutely pitch swinging a deal like the one Huestis’ representation swung to the next Carson or Clarkson. That prospect will be attractive to college players: Delaying a nearly seven-figure payday isn’t particularly fair or ethical, but guaranteeing one is a powerful lure, and even that piddling D-League salary is more than players are permitted to make in college basketball.

That lure wouldn’t draw more than a few more underclassmen per year out of the college ranks, I bet, and the players it draws would be mostly in the mold of the four early entrants mentioned: excellent college players with dubious chances of being drafted who would still rather be compensated with cash than free rent for a dorm room for their labor. And losing Jahii Carson isn’t a huge blow to college basketball as a whole — but it’s certainly a big one for Arizona State. Losing Brown and Clarkson leaves Missouri looking at a full-on rebuild; losing McAdoo damages North Carolina’s chances of competing in the ACC in 2014-15.

Few programs would be inured against this new possibility of premature departure. As a Florida fan, the idea that fringe prospects are able to sacrifice guaranteed money now to jump from the edge of the draft pool to a D-League roster and assure themselves of guaranteed money later is one that makes me wonder whether Kenny Boynton or Patric Young might have jumped at the idea. Your school has had players who would consider this gamble, too, whether you know it or not.

There’s also the specter of a more robust minor league system, alluded to in Darnell Mayberry’s original piece on Huestis’ pseudo-Faustian bargain. The NBA should want a flourishing D-League, one that allows every team to have an affiliate and develop its players in its own system like the Houston Rockets have with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers; that would, in theory, produce more polished players, and better NBA basketball, than the current system.

It would also create many more jobs in professional basketball in the United States than currently exist. Should the D-League eventually expand from its current 18-team configuration to 30 teams, giving every NBA team an exclusive affiliate, that would create something on the order of 150 more roster spots, with every additional D-League team adding about a dozen or so. That doesn’t sound like much, sure, but it’s still a dozen jobs that offer college basketball players the chance to play basketball in the U.S. and be paid more for that labor than they are in college — and then there’s the chance that players will be able to swing Huestis-style deals.

That will, I promise, sway more talented players to jump to the pros. And anything that draws more talented players out of college basketball and to the professional ranks will inevitably damage college basketball — especially because recent news makes it clear that the college game is going to be squeezed from both ends.

Emmanuel Mudiay would have been a star for SMU, maybe the most talented player in the program’s history, for his one year on campus before heading to the NBA as a potential No. 1 pick. Now he will make about $1.2 million to play basketball in China for a year before heading to the NBA as a potential No. 1 pick. The clear losers in this situation are SMU, and anyone who stood to benefit from Mudiay playing for SMU, but it’s very hard to cast Mudiay as one: He successfully circumvented the NCAA’s prohibition of players getting paid actual money to play basketball and the NCAA rules designed to prevent players like Mudiay, who maybe aren’t properly prepared for the “college” part of college basketball, from playing college basketball.

Mudiay isn’t the first player to do this — Brandon Jennings and Jeremy Tyler beat him by years, and Dante Exum (and his representation) debuted a new end-around this year, as Exum stayed away from organized basketball for a year, and still went No. 5 overall. But, more importantly, he will absolutely not be the last: CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish wrote about Haitian national Skal Labissiere on Thursday, noting that Labissiere is coveted by and considering Kentucky, Memphis, North Carolina, Georgetown and Mississippi — which has a shot at landing Labissiere because it might hire Labissiere’s guardian, because college basketball, y’all — and still might yet choose to play overseas.

That path to the NBA is, perhaps, more difficult than the traditional “play a year of college basketball, then make your money” path that is more or less the dream for most future NBA players, because living in a foreign country at 18 or 19, with or without handlers along for the ride, is more challenging than being cocooned by an elite basketball program. But swapping reading books and writing papers — or the pretense of doing so — for lifting weights and going to practice more often is a trade many college players would make even without the promise of a million-dollar payday. And Mudiay’s million-dollar payday is going to make many players, and many more hangers-on, think that they can get those checks, too.

It’s harder to quantify what the impact of players who never play college basketball would have been on college basketball. But, obviously, SMU could have used Mudiay, Indiana would probably have been better in 2013-14 had Exum become a Hoosier, Louisville would likely have benefited from Jeremy Tyler keeping his commitment to the Cardinals, and so on. Talented players eschewing college basketball has not made and will not make college basketball better, no matter how hard any college partisan presses the point that brilliant systems designed by brilliant coaches are the “real” key to the sport’s popularity, or makes the argument that “selfish” players just “hurt” the game.

In Mudiay, talented players who may not really want to go to college will see a new possible way forward that gets them paid sooner and makes their lives more interesting; in Huestis, or in a larger D-League, talented players who feel trapped by college ball will see a new possibility of an escape. And apart from finding a way to compensate players with actual money — which, to be fair, is a possibility, and maybe a likelihood, depending on the fallout from O’Bannon v. NCAA and other lawsuits — it’s hard to see the college basketball industry providing anything but the same old song and dance to its labor force.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it falls on deaf ears.