Jennings owes a bow to Garnett

December 08, 2009|Bob Ryan, Globe Columnist

All players must be at least 19 years of age during the calendar year of the draft, and a player who completed his basketball eligibility at an American high school must also be at least one year removed from the graduation of his high school class.

Main Article: Eligibility for the NBA Draft.

Since 2006, the above has meant that a top-flight basketball prospect coming out of high school has gone to college for one year, creating a category of player we like to call the One-And-Dones. But tonight we will be looking at a young man who chose a very bold alternative path to the NBA.

His name is Brandon Jennings, and he is the starting point guard for the Milwaukee Bucks. He came out of celebrated Oak Hill Academy in Wilson Va., two years ago ranked by most talent authorities as the best point guard prospect in the land. He failed repeated attempts at an entrance exam at Arizona, and, rather than submit himself to The System by playing at a lesser level of American college basketball (e.g. junior college, NAIA, etc.) he instead went to Italy, where he earned a reported $1.65 million from Lottomatica Virtus Roma, plus an additional $2 million for endorsing Under Armour.

Take that, David Stern!

Seven games into his NBA career, he dropped 55 points on the Warriors in an amazing performance that began with a scoreless first quarter and concluded with a 29-point fourth quarter.

Lately, some sort of reality has been setting in. Jennings went through a recent seven-game stretch in which he shot a dismal .304 from the floor (38 for 125). Somewhere in the middle lies a very impressive prospect, a southpaw guard with an Archibaldian shiftiness, coupled with an Iversonian fearlessness. Clearly, Arizona was after the right guy.

Young Mr. Jennings should make sure he extends a pregame fist to a certain No. 5 of the Celtics, because thanks to the Garnett Effect, he was able to pocket $3.65 million before reaching his 20th birthday.

Kevin Garnett was the human toothpaste who oozed out of the tube back in 1995, demanding the NBA take him directly from Chicago’s Farragut Academy rather than from an institution of higher learning.

No player had tried to come to the NBA directly from high school since Moses Malone, Darryl Dawkins, and Bill Willoughby had done it in 1974 and 1975. Their mixed success (Malone was an all-time great, Dawkins, a.k.a. “Chocolate Thunder’’ was a gigantic tease, and Willoughby was a talented, misused failure) somehow doomed the experiment, and the NBA floated along serenely doing its business with a mixed bag of collegians until Garnett changed everything by submitting his name to the draft.

It wasn’t that he wanted to be a pioneer, he says. It was a necessity.

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