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What a night!! November 5th, 2009 will go down as a truly historic day not only for the NBA Development League, but also perhaps for the game of basketball. I count three ways -- and I'll start with the two related to yesterday's 2009 NBA D-League Draft, and end with perhaps the biggest one of them all.
1) Latavious Williams became the first player to jump directly from high school to the NBA D-League.
I enjoyed reading Dan Shanoff's article on Truehoop about this development. This really isn't so surprising considering recent trends in basketball over the past few years (which have been well-documented), as well as our own track record. Our league has proven to be extremely effective in helping to prepare players for the NBA -- last season alumni from our league made up 20% of all NBA players. Our players compete against NBA-caliber talent, with NBA-level coaching, using NBA rules, in front of NBA scouts every night. In fact, the odds of a player making it to the NBA level within a year of playing in our league is 1 in 5 -- pretty good! So it should come as no surprise that a player with the ambition and ability to play in the NBA -- whether a top college player, a player with significant international experience, or a top high school prospect -- would choose to play with us, and yes our rules allow for this (and have since 2005). Of course, preparing for NBA success is not just about how you develop on the court, and we provide a broad menu of off-the-court skill development, continuing education, and even work internship options for our players. Latavious will not only get the benefit of world-class on-court training from the Tulsa 66ers (who are directly managed by the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder), but will have every opportunity to tap into these broader resources as well.
2) Amara Sy became the 1st top international basketball prospect to turn down Europe to play in the NBA D-League.
This one flew a little under the radar relative to my other two points, but I wanted to call it out. Of course, he did this for many of the same reasons most of our top players turn down more money overseas to play with us -- since our inception we've produced four times more NBA players than any other pro basketball league around the world! If your goal is to make the NBA and you're calculating your odds of reaching the NBA by playing in our league vs anywhere else, it's really a no-brainer (especially when you consider you have at least a 20% chance at tapping into NBA-level dollars at some point in the next year). What's unique here is while domestic players make this decision all the time, the fact that a player born and raised in France would also leave the comforts of home and fly across the Atlantic to play in the NBA D-League is a very strong statement about our effectiveness in producing NBA players. Whether it will become a broader trend is still unclear, but I do know many NBA teams are intrigued by Sy and will be looking at him very closely this season.
3) Last but CERTAINLY not least, Nancy Lieberman became the first female head coach of an NBA-affiliated team, and will surely become the first woman to coach NBA players on our newest team in Frisco (who will tip off in the 2010-11 season).
While it would be easy for me to say this is yet another example of our league's commitment to innovation on behalf of the game, this is obviously very different than implementing a "choose-your-own-opponent" playoff format or any of the other innovative things we've done over the years. The reality is that Nancy Lieberman is eminently qualified for this job -- her long list of accomplishments in the game of basketball at virtually every level and in every role speaks for itself. In many ways it's a shame that this is viewed as an "innovation", but nonetheless I'm very proud that our league was able to play an important role in this historic moment. The league approves all team coaching hires, and I can honestly say I was very pleased to make this particular call to Donnie Nelson, the owner of the Frisco team -- I started by asking if he was sitting down, and after I told him the good news he let out a whoop and said "Congratulations, you just made history." Indeed Donnie, indeed! :)
