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[QUOTE="Waltdods, post: 2463935, member: 2932"]
This is an interesting question, and I think there's an interesting answer.  To start with, obviously for any individual team, it makes sense to draft the 19-year-old if he is in the draft and the best player available.

But the NBA, collectively, can stop that from happening - it could require players to wait 2, 3, or 4 years from high school graduation, let them develop in college, and benefit from a lot of free marketing.  So the better question is why doesn't the NBA do that?  And there you have to account for two sides - the Players Association and the League.  From the players' perspective, there is an obvious principled objection to this rule - the players wouldn't want to be forced to play amateur ball.  On the other hand, the players who are actually [I]in [/I]the Player's Association at any given time benefit from keeping young guys out of the league and away from their job.  So you could imagine some openness to further restrictions on the players' side.  But why doesn't the League push hard for this?

I think part of the answer is that the League is concerned about destroying those parts of college basketball that are good for the NBA.  Force players to wait three years to go pro, many of them are not just going to say "cool, cool, I'll do an extra two years of sociology"; they're going to find ways out - to the G League, abroad, to yet-unformed options.  And in not too long, most of the NBA players aren't going to be playing in college.  Instead, they're going to be spending near-prime years playing in Sioux Falls or Shanghai.  So those marketing benefits you tried to get go away [I]and[/I] you're risking creating competition for yourself.
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