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A Tennessee Congressman, Steve Cohen, called the NBA's age limit "a vestige of slavery" and unfair in many ways.

NBA Commissioner David Stern, who would be the MVP of any college debate team, retaliated by pointing out that Congress itself has an age limit. Marc Stein reports:

"That would be like you saying that the talented people of the NBA -- college graduates some -- and talented graduates of many universities are not eligible to be congressmen because they have an age limitation of 25," Stern said.

"What the Congressman didn't understand -- and we'll be happy to share our view with him -- [is] this is not about the NCAA. This is not an enforcement of some social program. This is a business decision by the NBA, which is [that] we like to see our players in competition after high school. I don't know why our [nation's] founders decided that age 25 was good for Congress, but I guess they thought that was about maturity. And for us it's different. It's a kind of basketball maturity."

Great line!

But the logic broke down just yards away.

Stern spoke at a podium in a room under the Staples Center stands, steps from the locker rooms where the Orlando Magic and Los Angeles Lakers prepared to play Game 1 of the NBA Finals.

As Tim Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell points out by e-mail, the biggest names on the court -- Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Andrew Bynum and Rashard Lewis -- were all drafted straight out of high school. Of the two team's starters, only four went to college at all, as two more began professional careers at young ages overseas. Of the starters, only Rafer Alston, Derek Fisher, Trevor Ariza and Courtney Lee arrived in the NBA with any college experience.

Commissioner Stern can certainly make the case that it is good business for the NBA to have more established rookies. Who knows how successful the likes of Bryant and Howard could have been with some college seasoning? But the fact is that for teams like the Magic and the Lakers, players straight out of high school are the reason they're in the Finals at all.

It's impossible to see Bryant, Howard, Bynum and Lewis as problems that only the D-League, or a year or to at Duke, could fix.