Why the NBA's G League Ignite has not lived up to its promise

NBA commissioner Adam Silver wasn’t entirely transparent this past Saturday when he called into question the future of the G League Ignite.

The introduction of new name, image and likeness opportunities for college athletes is far from the only reason that the need for the Ignite has diminished. The G League has also failed to deliver on its goal of turning the Ignite into an ideal developmental alternative to the NCAA model.

The roots of the Ignite trace back to October 2018 when the NBA unveiled a new plan to enable top high school prospects to get paid without illicit bag men or bidding wars. The league began offering $125,000 G-League contracts to one-and-done-caliber talents who did not wish to play college basketball.

The announcement came at a time when the NBA faced pressure to lower its age minimum, which kept U.S. players from becoming draft-eligible out of high school. In those days, there were scant options for high school seniors seeking compensation besides playing professionally overseas for at least a year or soliciting under-the-table payments while in college.

After a federal investigation uncovered widespread bribery and corruption in college basketball, a committee chaired by Condoleezza Rice analyzed what went wrong and sharply criticized the NBA’s one-and-done rule above all else. “Elite high school players with NBA prospects and no interest in a college degree should not be ‘forced’ to attend college,” the committee’s April 2018 report read.

The G League contract offers were the NBA’s first attempt to address that criticism. They soon became the precursor for something bigger when the league discovered that $125,000 wasn’t enough to outweigh the appeal of wearing a Duke or North Carolina jersey or playing in an NCAA tournament.

On April 16, 2020, the NBA revealed that Jalen Green, the nation’s second-ranked high school senior, would receive $500,000 in salary to join the G League’s deep-pocketed new professional development program. The next day, fellow top 20 prospect Isaiah Todd decommitted from Michigan to play alongside Green. By the end of the summer, the developmental program had a handful of top players and a name: Team Ignite.

The first significant challenge to the NCAA’s monopoly on elite talent initially attracted significant curiosity and media attention. The Philadelphia Inquirer even prematurely declared, “This is the beginning of the end of NCAA basketball as we know it.”

Predictions like that one, of course, have not come close to becoming reality. The Ignite has annually siphoned away a handful of top prospects from college basketball, but more of those players have damaged their draft stock in the G League than have boosted it.

Daishen Nix, a McDonald’s All-American and UCLA signee, was considered the top point guard in the 2020 class when he joined the Ignite; Nix went undrafted in 2021 after shooting 38% from the field and 17% from 3-point range during a rough season coming off the bench for the Ignite.

Jaden Hardy had been hearing from the likes of Kentucky, UCLA, Michigan and Arizona before he chose to join the Ignite in June 2021. The projected top-five pick slid all the way to No. 37 in the 2022 draft after a cold-shooting, turnover-plagued season with the Ignite.

Izan Almansa, a 6-foot-10 forward who led Spain to a gold medal at the U-19 World Cup last summer, was a projected lottery pick when he came to the Ignite. He has suffered from a lack of service from a quality point guard this season and could slip to the second round of the draft.

While the Ignite deserve credit for their developmental work with 2022 Milwaukee Bucks first-round pick MarJon Beauchamp and 2024 riser Tyler Smith, some of their other purported success stories don’t hold up to closer inspection. Jonathan Kuminga slid from consensus top-five pick to No. 7 after his season with the Ignite. Scoot Henderson went from lock No. 2 pick behind Victor Wembanyama to being bypassed by Brandon Miller last year.

Why has the Ignite’s developmental track record been so poor? Some factors are beyond their control. These are teenagers playing in the cutthroat G League against grown men fighting for NBA contracts. Sloppy box-outs or sluggish transition defense inevitably gets punished. Even the most talented 18- and 19-year-olds will look overmatched at times in that environment.

The G League also doesn’t teach young players to compete for a common goal the way that college basketball does. For all its faults, winning matters in the college game. The Ignite is more about skills development and showcasing that to NBA scouts.

The real indictment on the Ignite program is that they haven’t always put young players in the best situations to develop. This year’s roster has eight developmental prospects, seven of whom are 20 or younger. It’s difficult to field a competitive G League team with that many young guys needing playing time.

It also doesn’t help that this year’s team at times has lacked a veteran point guard to handle the ball and set up the young guys, an established rim protector to anchor the defense or proven shooters to space the floor. For one brief stretch during a late January loss to Oklahoma City’s G League affiliate, the Ignite had five teenagers on the floor at once.

The byproduct has been a difficult 2023-24 season littered with losses by 20 or more points. The Ignite are 2-19 in the G League regular season and 4-12 in showcase games. They racked up 34 turnovers during their most ignominious loss this season, a 158-99 throttling at the hands of Salt Lake City in mid-November.

Between the struggles of the Ignite and the dawning of college basketball’s NIL era, it’s easy to wonder if the NBA has the appetite anymore to pay top prospects to develop in the G League. The Ignite does not have a public commitment from a top prospect in the 2024 class, though five-star Karter Knox has said he’s considering the G League route. Of the current players with the Ignite, only promising 17-year-old Dink Pate has said he intends to return.

The comments that Silver made during All-Star weekend will only fuel speculation about whether the Ignite continues beyond this season and, if so, in what form.

“I’m not sure what the future of Team Ignite will be,” Silver said, “because before there was a hole in the marketplace that we felt we were filling by doing that.”

Silver added that his “focus is turning to earlier development of those players,” perhaps hinting that the NBA could try to mimic what’s available elsewhere in the world by creating basketball academies for American high school-aged prospects.

If the G League does have a future as a pathway for elite high school prospects who aren’t interested in going to college, the NBA might want to consider trying to emulate the success of the National Basketball League. The Australia-based NBL has successfully positioned itself as a stepping stone to the NBA by providing developmental opportunities to teenaged prospects who either didn’t want to play college basketball or couldn’t after running afoul of NCAA rules.

Terrance Ferguson lit the spark by going to Australia in 2016. LaMelo Ball and R.J. Hampton further increased the NBL’s global awareness the following year. Oklahoma City lottery picks Josh Giddey and Ousmane Dieng both are alumni of the NBL’s Next Stars program. Current Next Star Alexandre Sarr has a chance to be the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s NBA Draft.

What’s different about NBL’s approach is that teenage prospects don’t play for the same team. The NBL incentivizes each of its teams to sign a Next Stars player by paying his salary and by not counting him against the team’s quota of import players or 11-man roster limit. In other words, there’s little downside for an NBL team to add a Next Stars player even if the league’s level of play is too high for him to initially contribute.

Could the NBA reshape its approach to something similar? Or are Silver’s comments a sign that the NBA no longer has interest in the G League as a developmental route?

The answers are murky, but one thing is clear: There’s little reason to preserve Team Ignite in its current form — and NIL is far from the only reason.