I've been itching to respond to Steve Kerr's recent Grantland piece arguing for raising the age limit because I find so much to disagree with. However, trawling the Internet for counterarguments, I found this podcast by Henry Abbott and Michael McCann, laying out almost every imaginable critique of Kerr's piece two months in advance of it being written. I find it more succinct, organized, and authoritative than anything I could put to text. Still, at the end of the podcast I felt like something crucial went unsaid. Kerr's piece ultimately had less to do with the age limit itself than with the larger problems Kerr uses the age limit to simultaneously attack: player maturity, development, and marketing. These are clearly critical problems to be solved, and in this two-part response, we're going to work on them.
But in the framework of these larger problems, Kerr's proposal to change the age limit by one year seems at best absurdly limited and unsuitable for these problems. Kerr's argument, to me, reads somewhat like that of a high school student who writes an essay arguing something trivial like that a first-time drug possession fine should change by $50, in order to ameliorate crime, increase revenue for the state, or advance political liberty by a few ticks at the end of the fiscal year, using a bunch of ad hoc, heterodox arguments. "It will ameliorate crime because... it will increase revenue because... it will advance political liberty because..." Perhaps, Steve, perhaps. Crime, fiscal policy, and liberty are enormous problems, though, requiring a broader vision than a rhetorical, cherry-picked take whose prime directive appears to be "stay on message." Continue reading →
