Milwaukee Bucks star Damian Lillard recently gave some very meaningful thoughts on his college experience at Weber State, NIL, and the transfer portal.
(via Milwaukee Bucks):
“I think I had a great college experience. I just think going away from home… I graduated high school when I was 17 and the people that I was around, I just learned so much. How to be a part of a team and how to be invested in a program and what it was all about. So I think that’s something that helped me a lot coming into the NBA, I wasn’t about myself because I was invested in a program for four years and I just had a lot of people that looked out for me and it just made me pour more into that. From my professors to the coaching staff, they showed me that they cared about me as a person as much as what I brought to the program as an athlete. So, I had a great experience. And I think as far as NIL… On one hand, I’m happy that players are being compensated for what they bring to these universities, because they make a lot of money off of them when you talk about the tournament and some of these big conferences. They’re on TV as much as we are and people recognize their names as much as they recognize us, so you want them to be compensated for that.
“But me personally, I just wish that it was kind of a better medium of… I hate to see kids… they put them on camera and they like, this kid went to Arizona and then he was at this school. It’s four schools in four years, and it’s like, I don’t see how that can be positive for anybody as far as the college experience. So I just wish it was something that they could put in place to where you can’t just hop around. I think it takes away from the spirit of college basketball where you usually might have a few guys that’s one-and-done that go to the league, but then you’re gonna have some guys there two years, three years, four years that care about the history of the program and what the program is about. You don’t see that no more, so I think that’s also part of why college basketball isn’t what it used to be. That’s just how I feel about it.”
