Michael Porter Jr. will likely become Missouri’s first one-and-done, just in time for rules changes

Theoretically, current one-and-done model for high school students looking to make the quickest possible move to the draft has been a boon for the NBA — it gives teams a bit more evidence for avoiding busts and basically turns college basketball into a brand-building machine.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver sees things a bit differently, though, and there might be changes afoot soon.

"My sense is it's not working for anyone," Silver said Thursday night before Game 1 of the NBA Finals. "It's not working for the college coaches and athletic directors I hear from. They're not happy with the current system. And I know our teams aren't happy either, in part because they don't necessarily think the players who are coming into the league are getting the kind of training that they would expect to see."

It's been just over a decade since the NBA and the players union agreed on a rule in that says players either need to be 19 years old or be one year removed from high school before being eligible for the draft. There are arguments for raising the minimum age to 20, there are arguments for getting rid of the rule altogether.

Silver said he expects to have more talks in the coming months with the union about the topic.

Now, “[not] getting the training that they would expect to see” seems a bit silly because a year of college coaching is better than the training they were getting before, but regardless, we could be seeing a new approach.

SB Nation’s Tom Ziller says the NBA’s developmental league is now in a place where it can handle the job of properly developing players without college basketball.

How Silver got to this point is largely irrelevant. What happens now is what matters.

What happens now should be this: The NBA’s development league, now dubbed the G -League, takes on the leading role in training tomorrow’s professional basketball players.

The G League will have 26 teams in the 2017-18 season, each of them affiliated with a single NBA club. Most of the G League teams are owned by their NBA affiliates. ... The NBA broke new ground in its new collective bargaining agreement by creating the two-way player model that allows teams two roster spots for prospects who can bounce between the G League and NBA club while getting paid a salary much higher than what the G League typically offers.

The next step is to find a way to make it worth the while of teenage stars-in-waiting to play in the G League for a year or two instead of signing on with a college program. Silver explicitly mentioned the fact that the G League already allows 18 year olds but that the NBA hasn’t pushed that option to high-end prospects.

Even John Calipari, the king of one-and-dones, doesn’t mind the thought of rules changes, even if he wonders about both the NBA’s motivations and the G League’s readiness.

Calipari reiterated, as he told me recently, that he's OK with a baseball model for college basketball. But he also emphasized his concern for "the kids" on Monday's media call.

"If they're trying to get kids in high school to go to the D-League, I will be shouting from mountaintops saying, 'What is this going to do to a generation of kids who say, 'Alright, I'm going to do this,'" Calipari said. "You get one or two years to make it and now you're out without any opportunities. Who's taking care of those kids now?"

No matter what happens, however, the current one-and-done rule will remain in place for 2017-18, and that will obviously help Missouri tremendously — it will put Michael Porter Jr. on campus for a year.

“It’s great for us, great for the program, great for the university, great for the state of Missouri to have a guy of that caliber, that magnitude to come home and play for Mizzou,” MU’s Martin said. “Talented player, 6-10, long, athletic, can makes shots and put the ball on the floor. He’s a very competitive guy. You watch (him) on the AAU circuit, but to see him up close, to see the way he competes, the way he battles, he embraces challenges. It’s an impressive for a young guy.”

While NBA commissioner Adam Silver has discussed exploring possible changes to the draft, the league isn’t expected to overhaul the eligibility rules before next year. For Porter Jr. to play more than one season at Mizzou, he’d have to buck a trend more than a decade in the making: The previous dozen Gatorade national players of the year skipped college or played just one season, including St. Louis natives Bradley Beal and Jayson Tatum, a pair of one-and-done players from Chaminade Prep.

Porter will likely bring ridiculous financial value to Mizzou and will almost certainly become the school’s first one-and-done guy, just in time for the one-and-done to disappear.

More Links:

• Dave Matter’s opponent previews at the Post-Dispatch have begun: Missouri State and Purdue are already up.
• 2019 Rock Bridge shooting guard Isiaih Mosley considers the Porters friends and will be visiting Mizzou in an official unofficial capacity soon.
• I appreciate PFF making sue this Mizzou blog always has something to retweet.

• Welcome, soccer freshmen.

• Yesterday was a good day.