The new UVA Basketball coach, Ryan Odom, had success recruiting internationally at his previous two stops, with Max Shulga, a Ukraine native who moved to Spain at the age of 14 as a developmental player, the cornerstone of Odom’s teams at Utah State and VCU, with his rosters also including Dan Akin, Luke Bamgboye, Michael Belle, RJ Eytle-Rock and Tobi Lawal (UK), Sean Bairstow and Kuany Kuany (Australia), Zee Hamoda (Bahrain) and Szymon Zapala (Poland).
Which puts into perspective what Odom is working on in terms of his first Virginia roster, which already includes a kid from France (Martin Carrere) and a kid from Germany (Johann Grünloh), with a lot of buzz around a 22-year-old from Belgium, Thijs De Ridder, and a report from one of our leakers that Odom is also recruiting another guy from Italy.
Why so much attention on the international kids?
The Googler led me to an article written by Noah Henderson, a sports-management professor at Loyola-Chicago, that offered some valuable insight.
In a nutshell, per Henderson:
It is evident that the European system has been successful in talent development. Unlike the American youth development systems funded by the families of young athletes who participate for the opportunity to play in college and generate revenue regardless of athlete success, the European system treats youth development as an investment: youth athletes who develop into strong prospects can be purchased by higher-tier clubs and generate revenue for the organization. The players that this highly organized system has been able to produce speak volumes about the effectiveness of the European model.
Basically, we’re doing it all wrong here in the States, leaving it up to the kids and their parents to figure it all out for themselves.
The point of Henderson’s article wasn’t this, but rather, the impact that NIL, as it has come to be, is hitting at the heart of how the Euro system has done what it does.
Guys like Max Shulga move from Ukraine to Spain at the age of 14 to get developmental training with a pro club, and that pro club pays for the training so that it can flip its top talents to the Real Madrids, Olympiacos and FC Barcelonas for a tidy profit.
NIL enters Henderson’s story because some of those top talents, and the guys who aren’t necessarily Luka Dončić, but can still ball, are seeing that they can make more in the States with a year or two or more from top-tier college programs willing to throw them $500,000 and more per year through NIL, and they’re going that route, because what they can get from NIL is more than they’d get from playing in Europe.
This is almost certainly the case with Thijs De Ridder and Johann Grünloh, both projected second-round NBA Draft picks, which means, they could get anywhere from $500,000 on a two-way NBA/G League deal to around $1 million if they made a roster out of camp.
The top guys in Europe make in the $3 million to low-$4 million range; the median is closer to $400,000.
This is the incentive for top kids in Europe to come to the States to play college ball for a year or two: they make more money than they’d make at home or on the periphery of the NBA, and if things work out, they play themselves from being second-round guys into being first-round guys, which brings with it a multi-year, multimillion-dollar guaranteed deal.
The problem for the Euro teams, per Henderson: if this becomes a trend, their incentive to spend money on developing kids through their teen years goes up in smoke.
I’ve written a bit about how little with the current NIL structure makes financial sense to me – as a first point, why does it make any sense for college programs that are either barely making money or are already losing money hand over fist to pay kids more than they’d make in the NBA or in Europe?
I can’t imagine that what we’re seeing right now is anything more than a bubble that will burst in a year or two, three years at the most.
In other words: a market correction is coming.
In the short term, Ryan Odom, who had success luring international kids to schools with almost nothing to spend, is now playing the game at UVA with a hefty NIL budget funded by hedge-fund billionaire alums.
Might as well, until the market correction comes.
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Chris Graham
