There are six high school players in Wednesday's NBA draft.

	Kobe's successful career sans college has helped make skipping school attractive.

This used to drive me crazy.

Not anymore.

I know it's harder for the casual fan to have any kind of feel for what his or her team is getting in the first round now. It's harder on everybody. It's hard on the scouts and birddogs who have to project these kids out three, four years. Harder on the coaches who have to coach them. Harder for the teammates that have to play with them. Harder for the kids themselves. For those who would say hockey and baseball also draft teenagers, I'd say there's one huge difference: the vast majority of those teenagers don't start in the major leagues, and even if they do, and subsequently fail, they go back to the minors, where they can work on their games again. The NBA is a one-shot deal -- sink or swim.

But this is where we are, and we need to deal with it. It isn't going to end pro sports as we know it.

I used to believe that a few high school kids coming out would lead to a flood of them coming out. And I thought that would be horrible, especially since all of the kids who have gone straight from high school to the NBA have been African-American. It throttled my middle-class heart to know that kids who had a chance to attend college wouldn't. And I didn't want to hear about tennis players, whose horrifying behavior on and off the court, I thought, proved my point.

But the results don't lie. The majority of kids who's opted out of high school have been good to great players, and good to great citizens.

It's hard to remember that this high school exodus is a relatively new trend.

"I was with Penny Hardaway," Grant Hill recalled recently, "and we were talking about just when we were going to high school and all the camps and the summer leagues. And we didn't even think about the NBA. It wasn't even ... it was about college. 'Where you wanna go to school? I wanna go here, I wanna go there, we wanna play for the NCAA championship.' And this was just 10 years ago. And now, if we were college juniors or seniors, it would be like 'what (pro) team you want to go to?'...

	Hardaway

	Hill

"It's really changed. And it's amazing that these kids are that good and have that kind of confidence. I was a little worried about going to Duke. I called up Coach K about two weeks before school started my freshman year, and I was like, 'I think I'm going to transfer to George Mason. I don't know if I'm good enough.'"

The genie is out of the bottle. Once Kevin Garnett jumped into the 1995 draft, and not only survived, but thrived, it was just a matter of time before others joined him. The next year, Kobe Bryant left Lower Merion High near Philly, and what happened to him was even more important than Garnett's success in Minnesota. Not only was Bryant drafted in the first round, but his agent, Arn Tellem, was able to intimidate the Nets, who salivated over the prodigy and had the eighth pick overall, into not taking him and drafting Kerry Kittles instead.

So Bryant didn't cut his teeth playing for the lowly Nets, where he probably would have averaged more points but won far fewer games. Instead, Tellem and his good buddy Jerry West were able to concoct a trade between the Lakers and Hornets, who wound up selecting Bryant for Los Angeles with the 13th pick overall and dealing him for Vlade Divac.

Every high schooler with some game got the message: I can play in the NBA, and I don't have to play for a team that sucks. Which may explain in part why Tellem has gotten just about every one of the high schoolers. That, and having Sonny Vaccaro's cell phone number.

But I digress. Let's look at the numbers. There are around 100,000 kids that play high school basketball every year. Since 1995, including this year's group, 19 high school players have opted not to go to college and enter the NBA draft. That's 19 out of a possible 700,000 or so players, a microscopic amount.

	“	It's really changed. And it's amazing that these kids are that good and have that kind of confidence. I was a little worried about going to Duke. I called up Coach K about two weeks before school started my freshman year, and I was like, 'I think I'm going to transfer to George Mason. I don't know if I'm good enough.' ”
		— Grant Hill

Let's look at the 19. Not including this year's six high school players, 13 were eligible to be drafted between 1995 and 2000. Eleven of the 13 were drafted. Two, Garnett and Bryant, are bona fide superstars, and a third, Tracy McGrady, is right on their heels. Three others are in the midst of solid careers: Jermaine O'Neal, Rashard Lewis and Al Harrington. Another three are just really getting started: Darius Miles, Jonathan Bender and DeShawn Stevenson. Two were drafted but were gone within a year -- Leon Smith and Korleone Young -- and two were complete, undrafted flameouts: Taj McDavid and Ellis Richardson.

Nine out of 13? A pretty healthy percentage.

And of this year's six, five are almost certain to be first-round picks. Only one is really reaching. That would make 14 out of 19 who will be in the league for at least a few years.

Granted, those 19 weren't taken at random, but were 19 out of the top 50 or so over that seven-draft period. And that does impact the league, directly and indirectly. Directly, because even Garnett and Bryant had a break-in period before their games began to shine at their current wattage. Indirectly, because those players (and their cousins that leave college ball after a year or so) never make the mark on college ball that equally talented players of previous eras did.

And I think it's important for the college game to be healthy. Imagine the difference, for example, if Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had opted to leave their respective universities after a year, or hadn't gone to college at all. Johnson wouldn't have won the national championship the following season. Bird would have never gotten to the championship game. As it was, most people knew precious little about Bird after he played three seasons for Indiana State, and what they knew came from watching him play Johnson's Michigan State team in the '79 NCAA title game.

But their teams had great runs in March, and met in the championship game, and that matchup opened to doors for all their matchups that followed. And that game was the one that ushered in March Madness as we know it, creating ready-to-wear superstar basketball players. When people watch the college game, they like to see how those kids turned out, so they watch the pro game, too.

But the NBA's responsibility to the college game is the subject of another column, and another writer. (Mr. Packer, please pick up the white courtesy phone.) This is about Wednesday, when a half-dozen big men will walk across the stage in Cary Mitchell suits, shake the Commish's hand, do their TNT stuff and then come talk to Quinn Buckner, Jim Durham and me at the Theater at Madison Square Garden.

And we'll ask them how the prom went.