Adam Silver, NBA to ‘reassess’ G-League Ignite program
NBA commissioner Adam Silver opened up to the media Saturday evening before All-Star Saturday night, which was, yet again, an unmitigated disas–….let’s just skip over that.
Anyway, Silver said that the league is “re-assessing” the future of the G-League Ignite program, which is in the midst of its fourth season, due to NIL in men’s college basketball.
“I think we are in the process of reassessing Team Ignite,” Silver said, according to ESPN’s Tim Bontemps. “Because now some of those same players who didn’t want to be one-and-done players because they felt it was unfair and they wanted the ability not just to earn a living playing basketball but to do commercial deals that weren’t available to them at college, to hire professional agents, an opportunity that wasn’t available to them at college, they now — all of those same opportunities have become available to them.
“I’m not sure what the future of Team Ignite will be, because before there was a hole in the marketplace that we thought we were filling before doing that, and now my focus is turning to earlier development of those players.”
Combining the G-League showcase and the regular season, the Ignite are a league-worst 6-31, 4.5 games worse than the next-worst team (Raptors 905, 10-26). Coached by former nine-year NBA guard Jason Hart, it sports the G-League’s worst offense and second-worst defense.
This upcoming draft class isn’t expected to be boisterous–we won’t conclusively know how good it is until a few years down the line, at least–but ESPN has four Ignite prospects inside their top-25: Matas Buzelis (No. 6), Ron Holland (No. 10), Tyler Smith (No. 19) and Izan Almansa (No. 24).
The Ignite program was built to fast-track the development of NBA prospects who didn’t want to attend college and make a profit. To Silver’s point, the introduction of NIL has helped the best college basketball prospects (at the best schools) make a profit as student-athletes.
Obviously, some student-athletes–depending on the sport they play and their stardom–make more than others. But as of the 2022-23 season, G-League salaries make a minimum of roughly $40.5K per season, a figure that can be topped by top-end NIL deals.
The list of current NBA players who have graduated from the G-League isn’t long, though a few have been able to carve out encouraging starts to their NBA careers–namely Jalen Green (2021 draft), Jonathan Kuminga (‘21) and Dyson Daniels (‘22). MarJon Beauchamp (‘22), Scoot Henderson (‘23) and Leonard Miller (‘23) have shown very positive flashes at the NBA level, too, even though each of their respective careers is very young with plenty of time for additional development.
NIL is only going to continue to grow in college athletics, which would render the G-League Ignite more useless than useful–especially if the developmental track record starts declining. The American youth basketball system is already bad at developing players. If the Ignite can’t properly develop young NBA prospects, then the purpose for having it isn’t great; if that’s the case, just draft the prospects to a G-League team with a developmental system in place (or find another reasonable solution).
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