Eliminating “one and done” rule will be good for the Detroit Pistons

The Detroit Pistons will be among the teams eager to see the details of the new NBA collective bargaining agreement.

One of the big issues on the table is lowering the draft age from 19 to 18 and getting rid of the “one and done” rule that forces player to play one year in college or the G-League before joining the NBA.

This rule was put in place after a string of high school to NBA failures that set teams back and hurt the overall talent level in the league.

But things are different this time around, and this new rule should benefit teams like the Detroit Pistons and hopefully bring more excitement back to college basketball as well.

How the new CBA rules will help the Detroit Pistons

Getting rid of the “one and done” rule will not only help teams like the Pistons, but also college basketball as well. For many of us, the NCAA has become an unwatchable product, as the best players are freshmen, most of whom will only stay in school for one year.

It’s hard to care about players when you know they are leaving in a year anyway, and the level of basketball in the NCAA has suffered from the days when even the best players stayed for three or four seasons.

Now the top high school guys can just go to the G-League or the NBA, allowing college teams to build and develop talent a little longer. Yes, you’ll be missing the “one and done” guys but there are plenty of great players in the NBA that stayed more than one year in college. Universities can build actual teams again instead of focusing their recruiting efforts on guys who will barely step foot on campus.

In the past, allowing high school players to enter the NBA had mixed results, as it gave us guys like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and LeBron James, but gave us way more like Kwame Brown,  Jonathan Bender, Sebastian Telfair, Robert Swift and Eddie Curry, players who weren’t physically or mentally ready to be in the NBA.

So how will it be different this time?

Now the NBA has a minor league in the G-League where these players can go and get a year or two of seasoning within a team’s system instead of being thrust straight into action to try and sell hype to the fans.

This should give teams some protection against busts and give the NBA a legit minor league system similar to what we see in Major League Baseball.

This mitigates the risk somewhat and will allow teams to be more patient when developing young players.

This should benefit the teams with a focus on player development, as they can build strong G-League coaching staffs and bring up players that have spent a year or two learning their NBA system before being expected to compete against top competition.

Hopefully the Detroit Pistons will be one of those teams, as they have put a renewed focus on player development. For teams like Detroit, who are never going to be elite free-agent destinations, this is the way towards sustained success.

The new rules aren’t likely to kick in for a few years, so hopefully the Pistons will be good by then, but they should benefit down the line, as they can really focus on creating a team system that starts in the G-League, which should  benefit teams that have invested big resources in player development as the Pistons have.