There’s a great piece on Yahoo sports by Josh Peter and Dan Wetzel about slimy agents trying to recruit basketball players and it concerns Kevin Love and his family. Really good, on-the-record stuff.

Everyone is at fault here, including the NBA for its self-serving and ought-to-be illegal rule that kids need a year of college before they can go into professional basketball. But I go all the way back to college basketball coaches, when they decided many years ago that it would be easier for them to recruit high school players if they could watch them play in the summer. That’s when this whole thing started.

Immediately, recruiting control slipped out of the hands of responsible high-school coaches — who are now often completely cut out of the picture — and into the hands of unscrupulous, irresponsible and just about completely unregulated AAU “coaches.” That one thing, more than any other, has facilitated cheating, the brokering of players, payoffs and under-the-table dealings more than any other single thing, while perpetuating a culture that fosters illegal and immoral activity rather than basketball development.

At the same time, a very high percentage of those AAU “coaches” aren’t anywhere close to the coaching level of average high-school coaches — further stunting the development of the players who spend all that time freelancing their way through summer tournaments that, first and foremost, exploit the high school players rather than accelerate improvement of their level of skill.

It’s a stinky mess that has soured me on college basketball for several years now.

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