Blame the NBA for the Deandre Ayton scandal, too

Arizona basketball head coach Sean Miller reportedly offered $100,000 to a person who could deliver primo prospect Deandre Ayton, a potential No. 1 pick, to the Wildcats. There are, according to ESPN.com, wiretap transcripts proving as much because said person is at the center of a sprawling FBI investigation into college basketball.

Ayton may not play again this season. If that comes to pass, he’d miss the most prime opportunities to prove to NBA teams he’s worth the No. 1 pick. Miller is almost assuredly out of a job, and could be sidelined for a couple of years until he cools off. Given the fact that he appears to be caught up with the FBI, he could be facing worse. Arizona will be punished mightily by the NCAA, who has already expressed outrage this week at a collegiate player getting a $64 lunch. A hundred grand can sure buy a lot of $64 lunches.

Ayton, Miller, and Arizona athletics will all get heaping piles of blame in this. The intermediary, Christian Dawkins, will be vilified. (He served as a runner for allegedly crooked NBA agent Andy Miller.) The NCAA will take its righteous lumps for refusing to figure out how to share its hundred of millions of dollars of annual revenue with athletes.

But the NBA shouldn’t escape scrutiny here.

The NBA’s age minimum rule is the only reason Ayton was on the market for college teams. Otherwise, he’d be in the NBA. He might be playing rotation minutes for a good team, or starters’ minutes for a bad team. He might be on the bench. He might be in the G League. But he’d be getting paid by a team that really wants to pay him, and he wouldn’t be breaking any rules.

That doesn’t mean that Miller or Arizona wouldn’t be offering to pay prospects who were interested in going to college. The NBA cannot solve that piece of the equation. So long as the NCAA insists it is an amateur sports association and not a paraprofessional minor league, it will have to figure out its own regulations and enforcement.

This whole fill-in-the-blanks scandal cliché reminds of the scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin where Jonah Hill is attempting to buy some sparkly go-go boots with goldfish swimming in the platforms, only to be flummoxed by the store’s policy to only sell its wares on eBay. Hill just wants to give the store money for the shoes, but the store’s arbitrary structure is making it extremely difficult. Arizona just wants to pay Ayton to play basketball, and the NCAA’s arbitrary structure makes it a rules violation.

Despite the obvious and massive NCAA problems behind all this drama, the NBA hasn’t helped by instituting its age minimum rule and refusing to take action despite widespread agreement that it’s not working.

Even NBA commissioner Adam Silver has acknowledged the age minimum — 19 years old or one year removed from high school graduation — needs reform. That reform effort has dragged on for more than six years now. The age minimum was supposedly on the table in 2011 NBA labor negotiations. Then-commissioner David Stern, who pushed for the creation of the age minimum in 2005, wanted to extend it to age 20 or two years past high school graduation. The players’ union wanted to abolish it altogether. But the revenue split between teams and players was a far bigger deal, and the sides tabled draft eligibility to be discussed after the labor contract was approved.

Amid drama in the union management ranks and a power transition from Stern to Silver at the league office, nothing got done. The topic was supposed to be revisited by the two sides in the 2017 labor deal, but it wasn’t. The league and union reached a quick and altogether painless deal well before a lockout or strike was threatened. The age minimum was put off for another day.

Silver reiterated his concern about the rule’s impact on the basketball ecosystem during his annual All-Star Weekend press conference. He indicated that a change to the rule would need to be bargained and mentioned that the NBA is looking closely at whatever recommendations come out of the Condoleezza Rice-led college basketball commission created by the NCAA.

Those recommendations are expected in April. Part of the commission’s charge is to explore the effect the NBA’s age minimum has had on college basketball. Something tells me the commission will find that the age minimum, which created the one-and-done paradigm, has had a deleterious effect on college basketball. (Just a hunch based on everything everyone not named John Calipari has ever said about one-and-done’s effect on college basketball.)

Will that finally spur the NBA into action? Do any NBA franchise owners actually care about the health of college basketball? If so, do they care about it enough to pay scouts to watch high school and AAU basketball more seriously? Do they care about it enough to start paying 18-year-olds rookie scale contracts again? Does Silver have the political capital with owners to push reform through? How will the players’ union — the full membership, who stands to suffer from an expansion of the player pool — react? Is there actually a path to expanding the age minimum to 20, which would create even more incentive for coaches like Miller to pay players like Ayton?

We don’t know where the NBA will go with this. It does not appear the NCAA is moving any closer to allowing its member schools to pay players above the table. Until the NCAA fixes that, there will be shenanigans. And until the NBA fixes its age minimum, players like Ayton will be caught up in the web.

The NBA isn’t the sole reason Ayton, Miller, and Arizona are in big trouble. But it shares some of the blame. It needs to acknowledge its role in the ugly cycle of scandal and do what it can to fix it.