Editor’s note: As the World Cup continues in the United States for the first time since 1994, The Athletic is looking back at college sports in the 1990s and how much has changed since then. Join us for a couple of weeks of offseason football and basketball nostalgia.
Roughly 72 hours before Kobe Bryant had to make the biggest decision of his life, one of the most influential stakeholders in the basketball world made a phone call in hopes of appealing to the then-17-year-old.
The life-altering debate Bryant found himself at the center of: Would he play college basketball or follow Kevin Garnett and jump directly to the NBA?
It was spring of 1996, and Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski knew Bryant, a standout at Lower Merion High in the Philadelphia suburbs, could be a game-changer for the Blue Devils. He’d spent months recruiting Bryant and, with the clock ticking, he called Bryant’s high school coach, Gregg Downer, who remembers the conversation vividly.
“I knew the decision was lurking,” Downer recalled. “I was on the phone with Coach K and I said, you know we’re getting down to the wire here. If you’re gonna launch a pitch, you’d better do it now.”
And then Krzyzewski was off, reciting a passionate monologue about why college basketball was the right choice for Bryant. He highlighted Duke’s back-to-back national championships and how he’d helped build multiple players into NBA stars, most notably Grant Hill, who’d just won 1995 co-rookie of the year honors and would make his Olympic debut at the 1996 Summer Games.
“It was a very motivational speech — I mean, I was ready to go to Duke,” Downer said, laughing. “But he didn’t have to convince me; he had to convince Kobe.”
It didn’t work. On April 29, 1996, Bryant announced he was “taking my talents to the NBA.” Two months later, he was drafted No. 13 by the Charlotte Hornets before being traded to the Lakers.
Bryant wasn’t the first high schooler to head straight to the NBA, and he wouldn’t be the last. The 1990s reshaped college basketball with baggy shorts, the launch of Duke as a powerhouse and the establishment of Rick Pitino as one of the game’s elite coaches. But the decade is also known for jump-starting a trend that hurt college hoops: From 1995 to 2005, 39 of the nation’s top prospects decided to bypass college altogether, drafted directly from high school to the NBA, previously an almost unheard of leap. That stopped in 2006 with the introduction of the NBA’s one-and-done rule, but the ripple effect still lingers.
Some of the prep-to-pro generational talent, such as Garnett, Bryant, Tracy McGrady and most famously LeBron James, put together Hall of Fame careers, quickly establishing themselves as NBA heavyweights. Bryant is considered one of the greatest players of all time, winning five NBA championships, two Olympic gold medals and earning 18 All-Star nods before his death in a helicopter accident in January 2020 at age 41.
Kobe Bryant became arguably the greatest high school-to-NBA player ever. (Eileen Blass / Imagn Images)
Many more — Korleone Young, Robert Swift, Kwame Brown, among others — defined the idea of draft busts. Young, for example, played in only three NBA games in 1999, got cut and never made another NBA roster. Brown, the first high school player drafted No. 1, played for seven teams over a 12-year career, averaging just 6.3 points per game.
And all of them impacted college hoops.
“Did it hurt college basketball? Absolutely,” said basketball analyst Jay Bilas, who started his career at ESPN in 1995. “When you lose stars to the NBA, at whatever age, of course it hurts. If you’re gonna be a first-round draft pick, you’re probably gonna be an All-American; so if every year college basketball was losing 15 players — that’s your first, second and third All-America team.”
Though Garnett is widely credited with starting the trend, there were actually two players, Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby, who were drafted in 1975 after skipping college. Additionally, while six-time All-Star Shawn Kemp enrolled at both the University of Kentucky and Trinity Valley Community College, he never played a minute of college hoops, joining the Seattle SuperSonics in 1989 at 19.
Fast forward six years, and Garnett was a skinny, 6-foot-11 power forward in Chicago who could post up, handle the ball and shoot from deep, an unusually diverse skill set for someone so tall, especially in 1995.
“People used to say to me, ‘You let an (almost) 7-footer shoot a 3?’” recalled Garnett’s high school coach William “Wolf” Nelson, a Chicago legend in his own right. “And I’d say, ‘No, I told him to shoot it!’
“His skill set was ridiculous, I wasn’t going to restrict him.”
Nelson said shortly after Garnett arrived at Farragut Career Academy for his senior season, “we had our own celebrity row at games, because all those college coaches and NBA scouts wanted to see The Show.”
Though Garnett loved Michigan’s famed Fab Five and Nelson said Steve Fisher, then the Wolverines coach, would drop by to watch practice, Fisher and his peers quickly realized Garnett likely wasn’t headed to the NCAA.
“Most college coaches, they didn’t really take him seriously as he continued to play,” Nelson said of his star. “People started thinking he was off limits, basically.”
Kevin Garnett, in 1995, became the first player since 1975 to forgo college and go to the NBA. (Anne Ryan / Imagn Images)
After Garnett declared for the 1995 draft and went No. 5 to Minnesota, Nelson heard through the grapevine that a Farragut player a year older than Garnett was complaining to friends, he could have gone directly to the NBA, too, if Nelson had just helped him. The assertion made Nelson roll his eyes.
“Let’s be clear about something: I did not get Kevin to the NBA, Kevin got Kevin to the NBA,” Nelson said. “Kevin opened the door and gave these other pro hopefuls a path. But if you’re the NBA, you’re not gonna start this trend with a guy who’s like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know about this one.’ You’ve gotta have somebody special — and Kevin was special.”
Bilas didn’t find the movement surprising.
“Basketball isn’t golf — you can’t add years to the end of your career, it has to be at the beginning,” he said. “And especially when there’s that kind of money, it was a bad business decision if you didn’t go (pro) back then.”
Nelson said another important factor to remember about the prep-to-pro craze involved academics. Garnett was ubertalented on the court and, by his own admission, not in the classroom. Getting eligible for college was a struggle. Nelson said Garnett had to take the SAT numerous times before he got a qualifying score, and by then he “was pretty much a lock” to be a lottery pick. That lessened their anxiety about the SAT.
Bilas pushes back on the idea that players’ performance in the classroom eliminated their opportunity to play in college.
“When players started going to the NBA out of high school, that took away some of the incentive to even get eligible,” Bilas said. “That absolutely was part of the dynamic. I’m not saying that was the case with everybody, but you can’t tell me these guys couldn’t get academically eligible. Some of them just didn’t want to get eligible.”
Still, in the current era, when nearly anyone can get eligible — including former pros, previous NBA draftees and players who, in prior generations, would have exhausted their eligibility after competing for four years — Bilas remembers the prep-to-pro decade as “a period where everyone was losing their minds because guys were skipping college basketball.”
“Seems pretty quaint now,” he said.
Nelson remembers the ’90s as the time when “street agents” became heavily involved with top prospects, trying to serve as brokers between college coaches and players, even though the street agents often didn’t have the knowledge or qualifications to actually help teenagers navigate a dizzying process.
That’s not so different from now, when anyone, including a fellow student, can claim to be an agent repping a player during a negotiation for a name, image and likeness deal.
Five high schoolers were taken in the 2005 NBA Draft, including the last high school player drafted, Amir Johnson, who went No. 56 to the Detroit Pistons. Then the NBA’s new CBA added a rule that players had to be 19 years old, or one year removed from high school, to get drafted, creating the one-and-done scenario that still permeates college hoops.
Before that, a handful of none-and-doners actually committed to colleges. Some even signed letters of intent. That included Johnson, who pledged to play for Pitino and Louisville. But Johnson struggled to become eligible, which Pitino discussed numerous times with the media.
According to Bilas, a lot of the committing was just for show.
“Recruiting was used for different purposes in the 2000s,” Bilas said. “When John Calipari took the Memphis job, he got 2002 prospect Amar’e Stoudemire to commit there. He was never actually going to go there, but it got their (2002) recruiting class ranked No. 1, and it made a splash, which helps him build the program. The attitude was, ‘His name is going to be by our name all year.’ A lot of coaches would do that.”
While some of the prep-to-pro generation publicly flirted with the idea of going to college, it’s impossible to know for sure if the NCAA route was actually on the table. Or at least, nearly impossible.
James, who grew up in Akron and was drafted No. 1 in 2003 by the Cleveland Cavaliers, has said numerous times that he thought hard about spending a year at Ohio State under then-coach Jim O’Brien. Imagine how dominant the 6-foot-9, 250-pound forward could have been in college hoops.
But Bilas insisted there’s no “one who got away” from the none-and-done generation, including James, no matter what the 22-time All-Star says.
“Nobody in their right mind,” Bilas said, “thought LeBron was college.”
