Here is the full quote, which came in response to a question about the readiness of players like Jabari Parker and Andrew Wiggins, who both struggled in their final NCAA Tournament games:
"If I were involved with the NBA I wouldn't want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid, to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I've been watching on another team and now he's 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid. On top of it all, the NBA does a tremendous, gigantic disservice to college basketball. It's as though they've raped college basketball in my opinion.
"Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they'll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I'm sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA."
No follow-up question was asked regarding Knight's comment.
This isn't Knight's first run-in with casually using the word rape. In a 1988 interview, Knight, when asked how to handle stress, told Connie Chung, "I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it."
More than 25 years later, Knight still doesn't seem to grasp the seriousness of that word.
ESPN later issued this brief statement on today's comments: “We spoke with him. ESPN regrets the use of the word.”
NEW HALL OF FAME CLASS
Grant Hill and Shaquille O'Neal had long, successful NBA careers, but before making their impact as pros they terrorized their opponents as college stars at Duke And LSU, respectively. Now they're being recognized for their collegiate greatness.
The National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame announced its 2014 class on Tuesday, and Hill and O'Neal were the biggest names on a list that also included college greats such as Louisville's Darrell Griffith and coaches Dale Brown of LSU and Gary Williams of Maryland.
Playing on some of coach Mike Krzyzewksi's early dominant teams at Duke, Hill, the son of former NFL running back Calvin Hill, emerged into an All-American as a senior, averaging 15 points and six rebounds in his final season as a Blue Devil. He helped lead Duke to back-to-back national championships in 1991 and 1992, the first ever titles for the school.
O'Neal was a force almost the moment he stepped onto campus in Baton Rouge, playing for fellow inductee Brown. Averaging 22 points, 14 rebounds and five blocks over his three years as a Tiger, O'Neal was a first-team All-American and the national player of the year in both his sophomore and junior seasons before leaving for the NBA, becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the 1992 NBA draft.
Griffith was a key player on the 1980 Louisville team that won the national title, earning national player of the year honors after averaging 18 points, five rebounds and three assists per game. Brown spent 25 years as the coach at LSU, making it to the Final Four in 1981 and 1986. Williams, a graduate of Maryland, was the head coach of the Terrapins for 22 years, leading them to a national title in 2002.
Rounding out the class are NAIA star Zelmo Beaty from Prairie View A&M, Howard Garfinkel, the founder of Five-Star Basketball Camp, and Glenn Wilkes Sr., a former coach at Stetson and an author of basketball coaching books.
The new members will be officially inducted into the Hall on Sunday, November 23, in Kansas City.
“The Class of 2014 has a unique identity with a player-coach tandem, along with three outstanding players and a coach who led their teams to national championships,” said Reggie Minton, deputy executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches and chair of the Hall of Fame selection panel, in a release. “With the addition of two men devoted to developing basketball skills at summer camps for close to a half-century, we look forward to celebrating them at the induction in Kansas City in November.”
DONOVAN SIGNS EXTENSION
No need to fret, Gators fans — Billy Donovan isn't going anywhere, if his latest contract extension is any indication.
Florida announced on Tuesday that Donovan actually signed a three-year extension in February which was agreed to last summer. The deal will keep the coach in Gainesville through at least the 2018-19 season.
Donovan's extension paid him a $250,000 longevity bonus before March 1 and increased his base salary nearly $100,000 a season.
Because of the bonus, Donovan will earn $3.9 million this season. He will make $3.681 million in each of the next five years at what is essentially a bargain price.
The news will surely be reassuring for Gators fans. Though it seems unlikely that Donovan would leave Florida for another school, where he's coached for the past 18 seasons, he once briefly accepted the head coaching job for the Orlando Magic in 2007 before changing his mind and surely continues to be of interest in NBA circles.
As a result of that decision, one of the clauses in being let out of his contract with the Magic stipulated that Donovan couldn't take any coaching job in the NBA in an ensuing five-year period. With that period now expired, Donovan is theoretically back on the NBA market should he desire to be, but this extension seems to indicate the NBA isn't in his immediate plans.
This season, the Gators became the first team in SEC history to go 18-0 in the regular season. Florida also won the SEC Tournament and earned the NCAA Tournament's overall top seed.
The Gators beat Albany and Pittsburgh to advance to the Sweet 16 for the fourth consecutive season, the longest current streak in college basketball. If the team wins its game against UCLA on Thursday, it will also mark the fourth straight year that Florida will[l have made the Elite Eight.
MASIELLO TO USF
Steve Masiello, a former Kentucky player and Louisville assistant who made such a strong impression as Manhattan's head coach this season, will become the new head coach at South Florida.
A source close to the coach told Sporting News Masiello will be named head coach of the Bulls by Wednesday.
Masiello led Manhattan to the NCAA Tournament this season, where the Jaspers nearly upset No. 4 seed Louisville, falling by just seven points in the round of 64.
Cardinals coach Rick Pitino brought Masiello to Kentucky in 1996. He was a member of two Final Four teams and a national champion in 1998.
He worked under Pitino at Louisville from 2005-11 before leaving to become the coach at Manhattan.
The Bulls are coming off a dismal 12-20 season in their first year in the new American Athletic Conference, which included a 3-15 conference record, good for last place in the AAC. That led to the firing of Stan Heath earlier this month after Heath spent seven seasons as the head coach in Tampa.
While Masiello faces a tall task in trying to rebuild a South Florida team that did so poorly this season, the Bulls did have success not long ago, reaching the round of 32 in the NCAA Tournament in 2012.
ACC TOURNEY HEADS TO BROOKLYN
In a move that began gaining steam earlier this month, the ACC will officially announce on Wednesday that it is moving its conference tournament to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2017 and 2018, according to USA Today's Nicole Auerbach.
The current plan for the conference is to play its tournament in Greensboro, N.C., next season, Washington D.C. in 2016 and then Brooklyn the following two years.
The ACC had begun eyeing the New York City area as a potential market destination when it expanded to include former Big East teams Syracuse, Pitt and Notre Dame, but faced a holdup in the fact that the Big East is locked in to hosting its tournament at Madison Square Garden for the foreseeable future and that the A-10 already had a deal in place with the Barclays Center through 2017.
According to the report, the A-10 has agreed to move its competition out of Brooklyn in 2017 and 2018 and return from 2019-21. As part of the deal, the ACC and A-10 will stage a series of interconference doubleheaders at Barclays.
The ACC tournament has been held in Greensboro the past two years and four out of the last five. Virginia won this year's event, defeating Duke 72-63 in the final.
SELDEN JR. TO RETURN
Kansas probably won't be as lucky with its other two potential NBA departures, but Jayhawks fans can rest easy knowing that Wayne Selden Jr., at least, will be returning to the team next season.
Selden Jr. announced his decison Tuesday on Twitter, saying "(I) want to let Jayhawk Nation know, I will be returning for my sophomore season! Cant wait to get to work & get back in the Fieldhouse."
The decision isn't overly surprising. Selden Jr. is certainly very talented — he was 247Sports.com's No. 12 overall recruit in the class of 2013 — but his draft stock doesn't quite match his lofty talent at this point in his career. (He wasn't projected to go in the first round in Sporting News' latest mock draft.)
Selden averaged 9.7 points per game and shot 43.7 percent from the field in his freshman season as an auxiliary scoring option for the Jayhawks.
The guard could enjoy a much more prominent role on the team next year, as it is widely thought that the two other Kansas freshmen considering the NBA are likely to leave. Andrew Wiggins is essentially a lock to leave Lawrence, and though Joel Embiid's recent back injury could cause him to hold off on the NBA for another year, most expect that Embiid will still enter the draft.
That would leave next year's team with a significant talent void, but it's one Selden will be able to help fill.
VCU ASSISTANT COACH TO RICE
As other teams and fanbases wait impatiently to see if VCU's Shaka Smart, the prize of this year's coaching carousel, might head to their school, the Rams are set to lose at least one of their coaches.
According to Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports, citing sources, VCU assistant Mike Rhoades is leaving to take the head coaching job at Rice.
Rhoades has been a head coach before, spending 10 seasons in charge of Division III Randolph-Macon in Ashland, Va., going 197-76 over his tenure from 1999-2009.
He joined Smart's initial staff at VCU in 2009 and has worked alongside the Rams' head coach ever since, helping the program make five NCAA Tournament appearances in those six seasons, including a memorable Final Four run in 2011. VCU fell in the round of 64 this season to Stephen F. Austin in one of the better games of the tournament's first weekend.
Rice went 7-23 this season, finishing last in the C-USA with a 2-14 conference record. That led to head coach Ben Braun stepping down after six years with the Owls, during which time he accrued a record of 63-128.
Contributors: Chris Littmann, Mike DeCourcy, Ben Estes, The Associated Press
