Bob Knight, the famous basketball coach of Army, Indiana, Texas Tech, and the US men’s Olympic team, expressed extreme unhappiness with the way the NBA is recruiting young players.
In an interview Tuesday morning with ESPN Radio’s “Mike and Mike,” Knight said he wouldn’t want a 19 or 20 year old having to deal with many of the issues in the NBA, reports Sporting News. He said, “I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I’ve been watching on another team and now he’s 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid. On top of it all, the NBA does a tremendous, gigantic disservice to college basketball. It’s as though they’ve raped college basketball in my opinion.”
He continued that baseball has the right idea, saying, “Three years before they’ll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I’m sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.”
Knight made headlines regarding rape back in 1988. He told Connie Chung, “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”