The First Law of Tim Duncan states that the more college basketball experience a player has, the more polished his skills are, the more seasoned his character is and the more prepared for NBA success he will be.
Its corollary, the First Law of Kwame Brown, states that a raw-tooled player straight from high school, however gifted and highly touted he may be, is ill-equipped for the rigors of the NBA game and represents a dangerous investment for franchises picking at the top of the draft.
The wisdom of each law is so conventional as to seem unassailable. Of course four years of college ball makes you better -- look at Duncan's fundamentals and intangibles, not to mention those four championship rings. And of course a kid fresh from the prom is a crapshoot -- Brown's fumbling hands in the post and poor judgment off the floor are Exhibit A. These things are obvious.
The only trouble is they aren't true.
The D.R.A.F.T. Initiative has used John Hollinger's estimated wins added (EWA) metric as a launching point for analysis. By using the stat, which measures the number of victories a player contributes to his team relative to a league-minimum performer, we can evaluate players' NBA success and failure rates.
For the purposes of analysis, let's use the following designations: Players with a yearly EWA of less than 1.00 will be considered scrubs. Players with a yearly EWA between 1.00 and 5.00 will be considered solid performers. Players with a yearly EWA between 5.00 and 10.00 will be considered stars. And players with a yearly EWA greater than 10.00 will be considered superstars.
Almost half (47.1 percent) of the 569 players drafted in the first round since 1989 have been scrubs. A big number, but not a shock -- the NBA is a tough gig. The surprise comes when we look at the failure rates of high school seniors and college freshmen as opposed to college seniors.
Of the 32 high schoolers selected in Round 1 in the last 20 years, 43.8 percent have failed to pan out. It's fair to assume a similar rate among college freshmen in the relatively new one-and-done era. The scrub rate for the 268 college seniors taken in the first round over the same period? 54.9 percent.
The other end of the performance spectrum tells a similar story. Of the high school players drafted in the first round since 1989, 31.3 percent went on to become either stars or superstars in the NBA, while only 9.0 percent of college seniors have done the same. And it's the high school talent pool, among all NBA player pools, that has most consistently produced superstars (18.8 percent as opposed to 7.3 percent of college freshmen, 1.5 percent of college seniors, and 5.0 percent of international players).
If we focus on lottery picks since 1989, the pattern holds. Of the 18 prom kings selected, 38.9 percent eventually tanked, as did 39.5 percent of the 86 college grads taken in the lottery. But 33.3 percent of the baby ballers became stars and superstars, more than double the rate (16.2 percent) of their ostensibly savvier, more experienced senior counterparts.
As Roger Daltrey has been telling us for the better part of the last 50 years, the kids are alright. Not only have they not been the riskier first-round choices, but they've also been the better bets, with the highest five-year average EWA ratings of all draft entrants since 1989.
It's difficult to draw a cause-and-effect conclusion from these data, of course. The six superstar high schoolers -- Kevin Garnett (1995), Kobe Bryant (1996), Tracy McGrady (1997), Amare Stoudemire (2002), LeBron James (2003) and Dwight Howard (2004) -- taken since 1989 would almost certainly also have gone on to become superstars had they opted for four years of college basketball.
But the data do shine a suggestive and critical light on the NBA's draft eligibility requirement, put into effect as part of the 2005 collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players' union.
According to that agreement, a domestic player must be 19 years old before the end of the calendar year in which the draft is held and must have been out of high school for at least one year by the time of the draft. (International players must also be 19 years old but are not required to be one year removed from high school.)
The eligibility rule arose out of a widespread feeling (after a decade that began with Garnett going No. 5 in 1995 and ended with Howard going No. 1 in 2004) that the league was getting too young, and out of a widely held belief that players who compete in college will gain what NBA commissioner David Stern recently termed the "basketball maturity" that would inevitably make them better players.
"This is a business decision by the NBA," Stern told reporters at a press conference before Game 1 of this year's NBA Finals. "We like to see our players in competition after high school."
It sounds right. It reinforces our perhaps romantic ideas about the value of higher education in general. It's consistent with our cultural investments in fundamentals and polish, in apprenticeship and tutelage, in paying dues and becoming wise in the ways of the world. We're reassured by such a rule. It shields us from Jonathan Bender- and Sebastian Telfair-style flameouts. It protects general managers and fans alike from overreaching. It codifies what we presume must be true: that these kids just aren't ready.
But as the league and the players' association move closer to the next round of collective bargaining (the current agreement expires at the end of the 2010-11 season), and with Stern recently indicating he may push to raise the draftee limit to 20 years old and two years removed from high school, the data suggest "polish" may actually be more myth than reality. The rule, beyond the question of its fairness to players eager to enter the NBA job market, may have very little, if anything, to do with an elite high school player's readiness to compete and excel at the NBA level.
Not even if that player is Kwame Brown.
Eric Neel is a senior writer for ESPN.com.