The National Basketball Development League (NBDL), which in part serves as the NBA's minor league system, announced today that it will lower its minimum age requirement from 20 years of age to 18 years of age, effective next season (note: the current 20-year old NBDL rule exempts players who are at least 18, had been drafted by an NBA team, and who were later cut or re-assigned by the NBA team). The NBDL age limit is different from that of the NBA, which now requires that an amateur American player be at least 19 years old on December 31 of the year of the NBA draft and that at least one NBA season has passed from when he graduated from high school, or when he would have graduated from high school, and the NBA draft.
The lowering of the NBDL age limit may reflect criticism that the NBDL's 20-year old limit is in violation of federal antitrust law, and specifically Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits agreements that unreasonably restrain trade, such as those impairing a relevant labor market (in this case, players). Back in 2002, sports agent Chris Brown of Orpheus Sports & Entertainment (and also adjunct sports law professor at Boston College Law School) wrote in the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel:
Under federal court precedent, the NBDL Rule most likely constitutes a “group boycott” that is illegal under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, exposing the NBDL to a potential fine of Ten Million Dollars ($10,000,000.00).It will be interesting to see if the lower NBDL age rule attracts any star 18-year old high school basketball players who would otherwise have jumped for the NBA but can't because of the new NBA age limit, and who don't want to play in college (perhaps because they would rather make money for themselves and their families than for the NCAA/CBS/ESPN/Nike/videogame companies etc. which profit considerably from college hoops). But keep in mind, the average NBDL salary is about $35,000 (in comparison, the average NBA salary is about $4,900,000 or 139,000% more than the average NBDL salary), and NBDL players travel by bus and stay in motels. And perhaps save for a few, nobody knows who they are. In other words, life in the NBDL is nothing like life in the NBA, and they are obviously not comparable employment opportunities.
The harm resulting from the application of the NBDL Rule is threefold. First, teenage athletes not drafted by the NBA will be excluded from the market they seek to enter, the NBDL. Second, competition in the NBDL will suffer due to the fact that potentially superior athletes will not be afforded an opportunity to play in the NBDL. Third, by pooling their economic power, the individual member teams of the NBDL, like the NBA, have, in effect, established their own private government, and the NBDL possesses market power in a degree approaching a shared monopoly.
The NBDL will be hard pressed to convince a federal court that the NBDL Rule excluding athletes from trying out for a team based on the fact that the athlete is under twenty years of age does not constitute a group boycott under the Sherman Act . . . Utilizing a strict age requirement over merit will eventually lead to judicial scrutiny.
But for some players, the NBDL might still seem like a better option than going to college (similar to how for some persons, going into a trade out-of-high school is a better option than going to college). After-all, while $35,000 a year might not seem like a lot to most, someone from a family below the poverty line (which, for a family of four, is one that earns just under $19,000 a year) might have a very different reaction to that salary.
We'll see.
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