Ball of Confusion

The Philadelphia 76ers finally traded Jahlil Okafor, the third pick in the 2015 NBA Draft, to the Brooklyn Nets.  It is, as they say, a cautionary tale, though one where the lessons aren’t all that clear.  Or maybe they are.

What’s plain to me is the risk for athletes who turn pro too young.  Okafor was nineteen when the 76ers took him.  Think about that for a second.  How does a nineteen-year old rookie go up against the likes of Dwight Howard or LaBron James or Marcin Gortat?  Okafor stands 6’11”, which made him a big fish at Whitney Young High School or Duke even, where he played a year.  But nineteen-year olds in the NBA find the pond a whole lot bigger, Kevin Garnett (and who else, really?) excepted.

Had he played longer at Duke, Okafor could have given his body a chance to mature, but no such luck.  Instead, he started banging under the basket with the big boys and came away the worse for it.  Okafor appeared in 53 games as a rookie, followed by 50 games last year; both seasons were cut short by knee problems.  This year, it wasn’t so much physical setbacls as a front office tired of waiting for a player to grow up.  At Duke, Okafor wasn’t known for driving around campus at 100 mph; as an NBA rookie, he found the need for (too much) speed on the streets of Philadelphia.  Another two or three years at Duke, and Okafor might have left with his priorities right.  We’ll never know.

  For me, the temptation is to say baseball is superior to basketball, given that MLB has very few nineteen-year old players at the big-league level.  But to be honest, there are a whole bunch of kids in the minors, where they get into all sorts of trouble.  The difference is most baseball players don’t have the kind of money to spend that Jahlil Okafor did.

There’s an old joke about first prize in a contest being one week in Philadelphia and second prize being two weeks.  Nowadays, second place would be getting traded to the Nets.  It’s a wakeup call, if only Okafor is mature enough to answer it.