In honor of Tim Duncan: the All-Graduation Team 1991–2021

Yesterday, in honor of new Hall of Fame inductees Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, I wrote about the high school draft era of the NBA.

The third great NBA player of the 2020 Hall of Fame class (inducted today, a year late, because of Covid-19) is Tim Duncan, who took perhaps an even more unconventional route: he stayed in college for four years before entering the NBA draft.

For great players of recent decades, that’s a rarity. Before then, it was commonplace to stay in college for four years, I was even mandatory until 1971; the NBA required that players be four years removed from their high school graduating class before entering the draft. But the Supreme Court’s Haywood vs. the National Basketball Association overturned the policy on antitrust grounds. Over the next two decades, some great players such as Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan left college early. Others such as Patrick Ewing, continued in college for four years, perhaps believing (or being duped by their college coaches into believing) that they needed that time to develop physically and hone their skills.

By the 1990s, however, leaving early was becoming increasingly normal. Three of Michigan’s “Fab Five” left after two or three seasons. Many other marquee players such as Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway also left school before their senior year.

Duncan, then, became an exception. Even more so as the number of foreign-born players, who never went to American…