JR Smith and the Equities

As a college basketball fan, I'm not all that bothered by Maurice Clarett's situation, in part because the NBA has been doing it to my Tar Heels for years - to the tune of more early entrants than any other school (Jordan, James Worthy, JR Reid, Rasheed Wallace, Jeff McGinnis, Jerry Stackhouse, Vince Carter, Antwan Jamison, Joe Forte, and others). Stay, go, whatever. Now, this year all of the current Tar Heels are staying, but we may lose one of our high school recruits, a 6' 6" small forward named JR Smith, which makes me want to pull all my hair out an hit the nearest Duke fan on the back of the head with a two by four. It also makes me doubt that Travis's labor law analysis is completely right. People have been trying to find a way to stop the flood of high school kids to the NBA as it is, and those NBA players want to protect their jobs just as much as the NFL guys do. If you could avoid the anti-trust complications with a labor agreement, I suspect the NBA would have tried it by now. Having said that, I will also admit I don't know a thing about labor law and generally find Travis's legal analysis to be dead on balls accurate (it's an industry term).
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 6:21 PM