The NBA’s rule that allows college players to enter their name into the league’s draft is akin to rape, Hall of Fame coach Bobby Knight said Tuesday on ESPN.
The former Indiana and Texas Tech coach was asked about the poor performances of projected top picks Jabari Parker of Duke and Andrew Wiggins of Kansas in games that saw their teams ousted during the tournament’s first weekend. Parker struggled in No. 13 Duke’s loss to No. 14 Mercer in the Round-of-64, scoring 14 points on 28 percent (4-for-14) shooting while Wiggins was held to four points and took just six shots in the No. 2-seeded Jayhawks’ loss to No. 10 Stanford with a trip to the Sweet Sixteen on the line.
“How much pause about a kid’s readiness would you have based upon his performance in that one, big, shining start,” Knight was asked by Mike Greenberg, co-host of ESPN’s Mike and Mike show.
Knight, who works for ESPN as a college basketball analyst, discussed how he wouldn’t want to draft an 18- or 19-year-old player if he were an NBA general manager, citing concerns over a younger player’s maturity. He then turned his attention to the NBA’s one-and-done rule regarding college players.
“I think on top of it all, the NBA does a tremendous, a gigantic disservice to college basketball,” Knight said. “It’s as though they’ve raped college basketball, in my opinion.”
Knight went on to say that Major League Baseball “has the best idea of all (leagues),’ praising MLB for its rules on drafting college players and its system of minor league development.
When he was through, neither Greenberg or Mike Golic questioned Knight about his rape comment. There is no mention of Knight’s remarks on the show page for Mike and Mike on ESPN.com, and the audio of the interview is not currently available on their site.
The rape analogy is not a new one for Knight. In a 1998 interview with Connie Chung on NBC, Knight, then the head coach at Indiana, was asked how he handled stress.
“I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it,” he said. Knight tried to clarify his remarks later, telling the Bloomington Herald-Telephone, “The word rape can be used in several ways. One is in something that has gone out of control or over which you have no control. It obviously was in that contest that I was using the word, as I explained in the interview.”
Two years later, Knight, who won three national championships with the Hoosiers, was fired by Indiana weeks before the 2000 season began. The dismissal came after Knight violated the university’s “Zero Tolerance” policy regarding the coach’s abusive behavior, which was adopted after video surfaced showing Knight with his hands around a player’s neck.
