As part of the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations in 2005, the players union and then-commissioner David Stern agreed on the policy in which all players selected in the NBA Draft must be (or be turning) 19 years old during the calendar year of said draft, and all non-international players must be at least one year removed from the graduation of their high school class.
Given that potential NBA prospects now effectively had to wait one year after leaving high school to enter the NBA Draft, it gave birth to the current “one and done” climate in college basketball: Elite basketball prospects playing college hoops for one year, as they bide their time until they’re eligible to enter the Draft.
With almost a decade-and-a-half of drafts having passed since the institution of this rule, let’s look back at the top 25 “one-and-done” players, based on the combination of both their success (or hype) in college, and their career arc after they arrived in the NBA.
One disclaimer: we also included one super-phenom NBA prospect who’s taken the college basketball by storm, even though he’s still months away from hearing his name called on draft day.
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