The G League began as eight teams owned by the NBA and known as the National Basketball Development League. The idea was to give players who’d been cut from NBA rosters before the season began somewhere to play other than Europe. The league was a common pool of talent; any NBA team could sign any player. In 2005 the NBA rebranded it as the D-League and shifted toward an affiliate model, allowing NBA teams to stash first- and second-year talent on rosters while maintaining exclusive rights.
By 2014 the organization had grown to 18 teams. Malcolm Turner, a former sports marketing executive, took over as president and pushed to expand the league to 30 teams and create a one-to-one affiliation for each NBA franchise. Last season, when Gatorade became the official sponsor—changing the “D” to a “G”—the league had 26 teams, 23 of them owned by their NBA affiliate. A 27th is set to join next season, and Turner expects to hit his “30 for 30” goal by 2020. “It’s taking matters in our own hands and trying to get talented young players NBA-ready as quickly as possible,” he says.
Last year the NBA added slots to every team’s roster for “two-way” players who split time between the NBA and the G League and can earn as much as $385,000 during the season. Turner says that next season, with the raised minimum, the two-way contracts, and other NBA call-ups, more than a quarter of G League players will make at least $75,000—on top of housing and health insurance. The most important indication of the league’s progress, he says, is that at the end of the regular NBA season in April, 53 percent of players on rosters had G League experience, marking the first time a majority of the NBA had spent time in the minors.
Most G League vets in the NBA aren’t boldface names. They’re role players and end-of-the-bench guys like Andre Ingram, the 32-year-old Los Angeles Lakers rookie who made his NBA debut in the team’s second-to-last game of the season after spending most of the past decade playing for the now-defunct Utah Flash and the South Bay Lakers. “You get one sweat suit. You’ve got to keep that for the year,” Ingram says of his time with the Flash. His three days with the Lakers, prorated at the $816,000 league minimum, earned him $13,824, more than he made in his entire first season in the G League.
The simplest way to make the minor league more attractive to elite prospects is to pay more. The NBA could try funneling them to the minors in other ways—forcing players drafted out of high school to spend a month or two there or making players who go to college ineligible for the draft until they’re juniors—but such moves are unlikely to get past the union. A $75,000 starting salary, however, could make the G League at least as appealing as the black market.