When Malcolm Turner took over as President of the NBA Developmental League in 2014, the league had 14 teams and was mostly seen as a backwater, a place where post-college basketball players went when they just couldn’t let the NBA dream die and accept a professional career in Europe as their fate in life.
In 2018, the NBA G-League — renamed due to sponsorship reasons (orchestrated by Turner) — has 27 franchises, each of them affiliated with (and often owned by) a parent NBA franchise, and thanks to increased pay and increased opportunities for promotion to the NBA, it’s begun to hoard the kinds of players who in the past would have become stars overseas.