The G League Ignite was supposed to kill college basketball. Instead, it was outlasted by it

The team that offered top NBA prospects $500,000 to develop for a year disbanded last month. The reason for its demise is clear

On March 21, the first full day of the 2024 NCAA Tournament tipped off, with high-stakes, captivating men’s college basketball games taking place at a dizzying pace for 12 straight hours in what’s arguably the most exhilarating day on the American sports calendar (perhaps matched only by the very next day, when we amazingly get to do the same thing all over again).

The games that day drew in an average of 8.5 million viewers, making it the most watched first Thursday of the tournament since 2015 and providing another data point for the country’s insatiable thirst for March Madness.

That same day, a different kind of news was made.

That afternoon, with the tournament’s first games already underway, word leaked that the NBA was shutting down its G League Ignite team after this season.

The timing of the events wasn’t planned – at least there’s no reason to think it was – but it was a telling moment that revealed just how much had changed over the past few years.

Four years earlier, the NBA launched the Ignite in grandiose fashion, with Jalen Green, the No. 2 recruit in the 2020 class, signing with the newly established team rather than going to one of the dozens of colleges that breathlessly coveted his services. In exchange, he signed a contract that paid him $500,000, the kind of money that he could have never earned in college, at least over the table. One day later, Isaiah Todd, the No. 30 recruit in the class, decommitted from Michigan and announced that he would be joining Green.

With that, once began as a curiosity morphed into a trend, with at least two likely college basketball stars skipping the stop that virtually every top player before them passed through on their way to the NBA.

What the Ignite offered was something more unorthodox. It wasn’t the first time the G League had offered up money to top high school players. In Oct. 2018, about one year after the FBI probe into corruption in college basketball was made public, the G League announced it would be offering “select” contracts of $125,000 to elite prospects beginning in the 2019-20 season. After no high-school player from the 2019 class put pen to paper on such a deal, that financial incentive was upped and, quickly, takers were found.

Along with the money, players would compete with other NBA-bound recruits they might have otherwise teamed up with in college while playing alongside older basketball journeymen (the final Ignite roster included Norris Cole, a two-time NBA Finals champion on the LeBron James-led Miami Heat teams, and former college all-American John Jenkins) in what was initially an exhibition schedule of 10 to 12 games for the Las Vegas-based team. Away from those occasional contests, the league boasted of the Ignite’s educational and life skills component that would further prepare players for their inevitable next step to the NBA.

When all that was put together, and with Green and Todd quickly on board, the Ignite was often presented not as an intriguing idea, but a threat to college basketball itself.