Published: June 01, 2009 12:27 am      

HERTZEL COLUMN - Ebanks now putting NBA career on hold

MORGANTOWN — Now that the NBA Finals are set and the dream matchup of Kobe Bryant vs. LeBron James failed to materialize, perhaps the biggest disappointment since the NCAA Final showdown between West Virginia University’s Jerry West and Cincinnati’s Oscar Robertson fizzled 50 years earlier, it is time to reflect upon something far more relevant to us at this place in time.

That would be Devin Ebanks.

Anyone who saw Ebanks grow through the second half of his WVU freshman season understands that while he may be taking sophomore classes this upcoming season he will be playing senior basketball, for he showed himself to be riding the NBA Express.

There was, of course, some speculation that Ebanks might jump to the NBA after his freshman year, speculation that if not insane was inane.

“It wasn’t even an issue,” coach Bob Huggins said this week while visiting the Glade Springs Resort on a Mountaineer Athletic Club fundraiser. “I don’t know how people get that information. Devin never thought about leaving.”

Now next year might be a different story.

Even before this year’s NBA draft has been held, there are publications holding mock drafts for next year, which is an exercise in utter insanity, considering that the order of picks isn’t determined until after the season.

If you want to know why they do it, there can be only one answer: Because they can.

SI.com, which must stand for Sports Insanity.com, lists Ebanks as the No. 13 pick of the first round.

Being thought of that highly certainly is a mind-altering experience, if not an ego-altering experience.

In some ways, Huggins and West Virginia’s faithful must consider themselves terribly fortunate that Ebanks came along when he did. Five years ago and he well might have been tempted to jump directly from high school to the NBA, even though he wasn’t physically ready to bang bodies with the big boys or mentally ready to deal with the daily grind and the ups and downs of the play-for-pay bunch.

Four years ago, the NBA instituted a rule that was hailed as the savior of college basketball. The league put an age limit on its draft, that being 19, meaning that almost all players had to wait at least a year after they got out of high school before putting in their NBA job applications.

College basketball was hurting. Consider this year’s NBA playoffs, where the three top players — Kobe, LeBron and Dwight Howard — list no college experience on their resumes.

They have no collegiate legacy, unlike say the No. 4 player out of this year’s playoffs, Carmelo Anthony, who got in at least one year of college basketball. In that year, he took Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim to his only national championship.

Forcing the best of America’s high school basketball players to spend at least one year in college seemed to be a huge step forward for the collegiate game, but as always seems to happen, there were some serious unintended consequences, which raised their ugly heads in the past year.

As Jerry Brewer, a columnist in Seattle, Wash., pointed out this week, it created a cultural problem.

All of a sudden, kids who had no intention of playing college basketball, who were unprepared academically and had no allegiance to the college game, were being forced toward college basketball for at least a year.

Rules? Who cared? This was just a season of seasoning.

So what happens? Along comes O.J. Mayo, who is accused to taking money from a street agent far back into his high school career and at USC, and Derrick Rose, who played his own basketball at Memphis but who may not have taken his own SAT.

Louisville’s Rick Pitino foresaw the problems, telling Brewer four years ago that “in some cases, recruiting these kids could produce an incredible burden for the program. The culture is so different now.”

What Pitino was saying was you were bringing in kids who weren’t academically ready to be there and who didn’t want to be there.

Fortunately for Huggins, this never was the case with Ebanks, who seems to be enjoying the college experience to the point that it isn’t a given that he will bolt after next year. He seems to understand that physically he is not yet ready to take the pounding of an 81-game regular-season schedule and the grueling playoffs which follow and that there are areas of his game that also need to be improved.

This is a kid who was brought up correctly, has his head screwed on right and who figures to succeed at life no matter which path his basketball career takes him down.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.