Interesting that the NBA is that proactive on the issue. My impression of the league just inched up, from zero to about 0.3 on a scale of 1-10. Good for them.
My suggestion, again, would be to build something into the standard player contract. Take half the signing bonus and 25% of salary off the top to fund an annuity. (Make up your own percentages; use whatever numbers seem to work to you.) The withholding could be stopped once the annuity was funded up to a level adequate to provide a reasonable middle class income. This need not be extravagant; $50,000/a year would do. The point is to keep the guys off the street.
Big time sports has become incredibly exploitative. It grabs ghetto kids with every socioeconomic/educational/cultural/attitudinal deficit in the book, punches their ticket in a completely fraudulent college experience, and markets the heck out of them when they reach the pros. Yes, the kids are just as irresponsible on their end of the bargain, but they're kids who are too often from bad backgrounds, who lack the basic grounding and mentoring that most of us take for granted, and who may be none too bright to begin with. The teams, the league, and the union should perhaps be much more prescriptive, in recognition of the shaky material with which they're working.
“Big time sports has become incredibly exploitative.”
I’ve never liked the term “exploitation,” mostly because of its slipperiness. You can use it for everything from enslavement to fair exchange. It can mean you’re getting the better of someone or simply utilizing something, like how I exploit my spoon to deliver breakfast. No doubt exploiters of the word want you to think of it always and forever in the negative sense. Which is why perfectly just and mutually beneficial exchanges can so easily be painted as immoral, and why nonsensical phrases like “wage slavery” aren’t laughed out of hand.
Certainly when the exploited party gets 100 mil out of the deal it’s not the bad kind of exploited. Even if you know beforehand they’ll fritter it away. Unless you manage to grab it from the other end, which is very, very true I suppose of the agent/management department of the sports industrial complex. But we’re needlessly complicating things. Iverson still made way, way more take money than he’d ever be able to earn doing anything else. Therefore, the vast sports conspiracy’s exploitation was also his gain.
“It grabs ghetto kids with every socioeconomic/educational/cultural/attitudinal deficit in the book”
Bear in mind that this is not done so as to get the most exploitable players. It happens to be, and always will be, that the best athletes are largely poor, aggressive, and stupid. Blame God or all of human history for that, not greedy basketball Fat Cats.