<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Greg Oden won't graduate from high school until next year, but many believe the 6-foot-11 center from Indianapolis could be the No. 1 pick in this year's NBA draft if he were eligible. Oden, 17, says he wants to play college basketball, and now it looks as if he will. With the NBA's decision as part of its new collective-bargaining agreement that players cannot be drafted until a year after their high school class graduates, Oden won't be eligible in 2006, either ? meaning the decision hardly anyone believed Oden would really make has been made for him. "I guess we'll never know what would have happened," said Michael Conley, the former Olympic triple jump champion who coaches Oden's Indianapolis-based summer league team, which includes Conley's son, Michael Conley Jr., also Oden's teammate at Lawrence North High. "Greg has always said he wants to go to college," the elder Conley said. "But if all of a sudden his senior year, he explodes and you're talking about $90 million, $100 million, that's something he has to consider. An NBA age restriction takes away that option." The NBA decision means some high school players who would have jumped straight to the NBA might now play a year in college, but it is hardly being met with rejoicing in college circles. "I'm disappointed. This is just a stopgap measure," Arizona Coach Lute Olson said in a statement. "It gives the NBA the ability to say that they did something about the problem, but it doesn't realistically address the problem or the effect it has on college basketball." NCAA executives and coaches admire the baseball model, where players may be drafted out of high school but once they enter college must wait three years to be eligible for the draft again. Earlier talk of an NBA minimum age of 20 was met with some enthusiasm, because coaches envisioned players staying at least two years. But many coaches feel the change the NBA adopted makes little difference. "I think it's a compromise that accomplishes very little in terms of limiting the numbers of early entrants," Olson said. Jim Haney, executive director of the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches, said the move "strikes me as no real change." "For kids aspiring to go directly to the NBA, maybe they'll go to prep school for a year," Haney said. "How many are going to play in the NBA, and how many are going to go play in the developmental league a couple of years and have nothing afterwards?" Coaches who once faced decisions about whether to spend time and money recruiting a player they believed would probably go straight to the NBA now must decide whether it is worth it to recruit a player for one year. It was for Syracuse, which lost Carmelo Anthony after one season but won the 2003 NCAA title. But at programs such as Duke, North Carolina and Arizona, hit repeatedly by early departures in recent years, coaches worry about recruiting players year after year for careers that are both brief and unpredictable. "Very seldom does one year of college benefit either the player or the program," Olson said. "Carmelo Anthony might be the only example of that. But it does create a problem by having to continually recruit behind players and deal with speculation about who might be leaving and who might be staying."</div> Source
