Big Baller Brand head honcho, LaVar Ball has announced that he is founding the Junior Basketball Association. It is a professional basketball league that will offer high school players an alternative to playing in college and will pay them up to $10,000 per month. The JBA league will launch in the summer of 2018 and will be sponsored by the Triple B brand.
"All nationally ranked high school seniors, whose main goal are to reach the NBA, will be offered an opportunity to join the JBA, turning pro straight out of high school and bypassing the usual college pit stop," Ball said in a statement to SLAM Magazine. "The participating players will be paid up to $10,000 per month, as they prepare to enter the NBA Draft the following year...With the introduction of the JBA, allowing the NCAA to regulate and control the eligibility status of top basketball prospects will no longer be an issue." The NCAA has long been involved in a debate about whether or not college athletes who make millions of dollars for their schools should be paid, it looks like Ball is reaffirming that they should.
LaVar is continuing to make business moves that present the basketball players as the owners of their brands and that allow for a change in the traditional basketball system. He removed his youngest son Melo from his high school, as well as, created a signature shoe for the 16-year-old. This move to create a league may have come off of his other son LiAngelo losing his ability to play college ball with UCLA because of the theft incident he had in China.
Source: ESPN
