NBA Basketball is the set of thirty teams that make up the top professional basketball league in the USA (and debatably, worldwide). NCAA Basketball represents all universities and colleges in the US that have an official basketball team. There are hundreds across the country. Furthermore, the structure of the game is a little bit different: in NCAA the game is played in two 20-minute halves, whereas in the NBA there are four 12-minute quarters. The first noted differences are the amount of teams, and the structure of the game.

Many NBA superstars spent time in college playing NCAA Basketball, and many attribute their success today to the training they received back then. Generally, college basketball players’ skills are not as fine-tuned as NBA players (yet) so coaching plays a greater role in the overall success of an NCAA team. Indeed, some of the most famous coaches hail from NCAA basketball, namely Mike Krzyzewski (aka “Coach K”), long-time, now-retired coach for the Duke Blue Devils, and Jim Boeheim, long-time coach for the Syracuse Orange. Another noted difference therefore is that coaching plays a bigger role in NCAA Basketball.

Furthermore, critics of the NBA style of play lament that there is no defense anymore, in today’s game. Indeed, even as a casual fan, you can put a regular season NBA game and a regular season NCAA game side-by-side and quickly see that the intensity on the defensive end is much higher in the latter. No NCAA player is allowed to take a defensive sequence “off”, whereas we see it happen often in the NBA that a player does not run back on defense after missing a contested shot at the rim or that they are not even in a guarding position when the opponent has the ball in their half of the court.

Despite these critics, it is evident that individually, NBA players are significantly better than NCAA players. Indeed, only a tiny fraction of players that play NCAA ball make it to the NBA. Most sources, such as Sportskeeda, state that 1.2% of players that play NCAA basketball make it to the NBA. There is therefore potential for constant, incredibly high-level play in the NBA, but sometimes teams and/or players do not play 100% and this kind of high-intensity play comes out consistently in the playoffs only, not in the regular season as much. Some NBA players, like Anthony Edwards, try to change the narrative. He does not take plays nor games off, plays hard all the time whether his team is playing the Washington Wizards or the Boston Celtics. For the most part however, the NBA is turning into a league of overpaid, under-working athletes.