New Research by Mixon and Colleagues Examines the Hoarding of "One-and-Done" Caliber Players in College Basketball

As discussed in a July 2023 post here at Turner Business,  the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its players union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement in 2005 that established a minimum age of 19 for all players entering the league, while U.S. high school basketball stars were also required to wait at least one year after high school graduation before being eligible for the NBA Draft. This ended the so-called prep-to-pro pipeline and instead meant that all potential prep-to-pro caliber U.S. high school basketball stars would compete collegiately for at least one season before joining the NBA. It also led to popular use of the phrase “one-and-done” by basketball coaches, players and fans as a replacement for the outdated “prep-to-pro” mantra. New research by Turner College economist Frank Mixon, Auburn University's Steven Caudill, Florida Atlantic University's João Ricardo Faria and Artois University's Laura Ciucci examines both the costs of assimilation and impact on team strength of the addition to a collegiate basketball team of one-and-done players. In doing so, the researchers develop a dynamic game in which team strength is a function of coaching capital, player capital and team-specific capital, and wherein one-and-done players have higher levels of innate talent and lower levels of experience and development compared to most returning players. The stock of team-specific capital is increased in the model through coaching and assimilation over time as players learn new offensive and defensive alignments and become acquainted with a new set of teammates and coaches. The one-and-done player takes the one-year opportunity to develop new skills, taking into account the adjustment costs associated with learning and adapting to a new team and system. The team's problem consists of maximizing its strength with respect to coaching capital, given a set of player assets and the optimal development of one-and-done players. The researchers integrate the Bradley-Terry approach to team strength that is based on pairwise comparisons into the dynamic game by considering how acquisition of a one-and-done player impacts the probability that the team defeats a given opponent. In doing so, they describe how teams face incentives to hoard one-and-done caliber players, even in some cases where their acquisition reduces a team's strength, so that their opponents are deprived of the opportunity to improve by acquiring them. Stay connected to Turner Business for more on this study in the future.