If you are looking at playing professional basketball but you aren’t looking to play in college, The Las Vegas Dealers could be the place for you. The Las Vegas Dealers is a proposed semi pro team in Nevada. The concept of the team is simple. If you don’t want to play a year of college and want to get paid to play professionally right off, you sign with the Dealers and it’s $700,000 for a year if you are a ‘one or done’ player. The Dealers are trying to attract 18 year old highly recruited basketball stars to join the league for a year then enter the draft. The guy behind this whole idea is Cerruti Brown, essentially a mystery man. Brown doesn’t have Facebook, Twitter or any online presence. He is a self proclaimed businessman and he is striving in anonymity. Despite being virtually unknown, Brown is very confident in his basketball team. His goal is to sign at least 5 players from the McDonalds All American team. The season would be a 55 game slate with 40 games played at home in Vegas, and 15 would be played in Europe. Every team they play would be from the Euroleague. The Dealers would also play by the international rules. The controversy behind the organization is that the funds from the team are all being fundraised or donated, they don’t belong to a league that gets funds from other teams. The money is never really guaranteed since it’s an independent team. It’s a very high risk/high reward idea and is very intriguing, but the risk might be a little too high. Signing the contract would be about the same thing as investing in an unproven business. NBA scouts would also argue that they aren’t playing the competition they want the college recruits to play before they enter the league. The home arena would be at Cox Pavilion which is attached to a building on UNLV’s campus and would seat around 3,100 people. Another controversy is the scheduling of the games. The Dealers are trying to scramble a roster and schedule with the Euroleague before their first ever season in October. If they don’t get it all settled by then, it could be over before it even started and the prospects could miss out on a season in it’s entirety. It could potentially be a great thing, and is certainly an interesting one. For once, college basketball could have a legitimate competitor and also raises the question of paying college athletes. If this went through, and the players started to skip out on college for the paycheck, I assume the NCAA would look into some kind of payment for the athletes. $700,000 is a lot of money to wrap around an 18 year old athlete’s head and is almost too good to turn down. Especially for someone who is looking to solve a money issue immediately and can’t wait a year before getting a serious paycheck. Former NBA players are looking into this league as an option to jumpstart their careers again. Royce White, the player who has only recorded 9 minutes in the NBA total over a span of 3 years due to anxiety and depression issues, has expressed interest in joining the team, and has been contacted by the Dealers. Overall, this could be a great thing in the game of basketball and could change the way college teams treat their athletes. This is a very interesting idea, and it will be followed closely these next couple months to see if it follows through.
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Ethan Welch
Ethan is a senior. He plays basketball, and competes on the cross country and track teams at Winslow High School. |