What This Lackluster NBA Draft Needed: High Schoolers

Another NBA Draft has come and gone, and this one took some serious flak for being one of the shallowest drafts in years.

As the night progressed, it was increasingly compared to the 2006 Draft, in which Andrea Bargnani went first, and Adam Morrison went third, and even the bottom-of-the-barrel 2000 Draft where Kenyon Martin was the first pick, almost by default and then he was followed by Stromile Swift, Darius Miles, Marcus Fizer, and Mike Miller. Yep, those were the top five picks.

While this draft had some foreign entries to add uncertainty and intrigue, it seemed to lack in "super-stardom". Outside of Blake Griffin and perhaps Ricky Rubio, it lacked players worth getting excited about. Where were the Kevin Garnetts, the Kobe Bryants, and the LeBron Jameses?

Oh, right, the NBA doesn't do that anymore. Instead of allowing these NBA-ready players to go straight to the NBA out of high school like KG, Kobe, and LeBron did, they're instead compelled to go to college or overseas for a year.This year that tactic doesn't look like it helped anybody.

Jrue Holiday, the 17th pick, likely hurt his draft stock by going to UCLA and playing out of position for a year. He slid over to shooting guard, as they already had Darren Collison at the point. DeMar DeRozan went as the 9th pick, put on a good show in the Pac-10 tournament, but his USC team didn't make a huge splash any other time during his one season. Brandon Jennings, pick number ten, may have also dropped by adding some foreign uncertainty to his resumé.

These guys may not have been superstars, it's true. Maybe locking them out of the league for a year could help to weed out the unqualified, but these guys were still first-rounders. Instead of making progress it felt like their careers were on pause for a year, waiting for their eligibility.

Is there going to be a future superstar high-schooler every year? Of course not, but how about every couple years? Sure, absolutely.

The drafts in '95, '96, and '97 saw Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, and Tracy McGrady in consecutive years. There was then a drought for several years, with still some highlights like Al Harrington and Rashard Lewis, until '03 gave us LeBron James, '04 gave us Amare Stoudemire and Dwight Howard, and '05 produced Andrew Bynum and Monta Ellis.

Pretty convincing names.

Some of the league's most visible and highly-marketed players, then, skipped college. And the stars of all three teams that appeared in the NBA Finals the last two years (KG, Kobe, and Dwight Howard) are on that list. LeBron had led a team to the Finals, too, and probably will again.

One could, of course, put together an equally compelling list of NBA busts that were drafted out of high school. Or an even bigger list of busts that went to college first.

Never has the NBA Draft been about guarantees. It's about teams gambling on a pick and crossing their fingers that they got the right guy. It's all based on potential, allowing fans and pundits to throw around "upside" and "ceiling" in heated discussion that finds its answer on the court.

And only time will tell if this year's draft list contains some superstars. There is the opportunity, for sure, even if the draft seems a little dry. What it lacked was perhaps the buzz of, for example the 2003 draft, where LeBron James showed the potential to be not only a star, but perhaps among the greatest to ever play.

The arguments for and against the "One-and-Done" rule have been thoroughly hashed out elsewhere, and so don't need to be repeated fully here. It's true that most ballers, even some of the most talented, aren't ready for the NBA right out of high school—but the Derrick Rose fiasco is showing us that the rule can cause real problems.

It can be argued that the one-year rule doesn't keep those superstars from the NBA, and that we would have still received KG, Kobe, and LeBron—just a year later. That may be true—a good example is Kevin Durant, who could have made a seamless transition to the NBA and wasn't hurt by playing a year at Texas. But why make him wait?

I don't know if there were any superstar-embryo, NBA-ready high-schoolers in line this year.

I do know that this draft could have used a LeBron James.