With continuing debate of whether college athletes should be paid, NBA commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged on Wednesday the league is considering subsidizing NCAA basketball players to encourage them to stay in school, ESPN reports.
Silver wants student athletes to stay in school longer, and one thing on his agenda is raising the minimum age requirement of the NBA draft from 19 to 20 years old. While it would take time for the NBA Players Association to approve the change, one idea the league is considering is incentivizing students to stay by paying them.
"Silver said he could envision the league potentially contributing to make up the actual cost of attendance gap above what the players get for their scholarships and getting involved in a more complete insurance plan, which could include disability insurance should an athlete return to school and injure himself so badly he could never play again," ESPN's Darren Rovell wrote on Wednesday. "Currently, the NCAA provides only a preferred loan rate to elite athletes whom it deems to be potential high draft picks."
The NBA's current draft rules allow an athlete to declare when 19 years old, which essentially gives some players the opportunity to leave college after freshman year.
The lure of making money in the NBA is often a motivating factor to be a "one-and-done" player at college, something Silver hopes to mitigate to some degree by potentially subsidizing their basic necessities.
"Rather than focusing on a salary and thinking of them as employees, I would go to their basic necessities," Silver said on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Nets game, via ESPN. "I think if [Connecticut Huskies guard] Shabazz Napier is saying he is going hungry, my god, it seems hard to believe, but there should be ample food for the players."
Silver also said any solution would have to be a "three-way conversation."
"It does, in my mind, need to be a three-way conversation," he said. "You heard college administrators at press conferences around the [NCAA] tournament say that it's the NBA's problem or the union is putting up resistance. It's a more complex problem than that."
