Object lesson

This shard of a shoe over here. There's your teachable moment for today.

In its immediately previous life it swaddled the left foot of a man-child, Zion Williamson, and then suddenly it didn't. It went off like a roadside bomb, disintegrating as the man-child backpedaled down the floor barely half a minute into the latest Duke-North Carolina melodrama Wednesday night. Completely came apart, sending Williamson into an awkward sprawl, his right knee turning in a way knees aren't supposed to turn.

Not a great moment for Nike, whose chunky shoe deal with Mike Krzyzewski and the Duke program saddles the Blue Devils with exploding footwear. But an appropriate object for this object lesson.

Which is, why was Zion Williamson even on the floor last night?

Only the NBA's absurd 19-year-old rule put him out there, after all. Without it, he's in the first year of a lucrative pro contract as a 2018 lottery pick. Instead he's forced to play at being a college student as an unpaid mercenary, brought in to help Duke cash a fat NCAA Tournament check.

Now he's out with a knee injury, and if he's lucky it really is just the mild sprain Krzyzewski maintained after Carolina took his top-ranked Blue Devils apart. But luck shouldn't have factored into this at all.

Scottie Pippen took some heat from some old-school types not long ago by saying Williamson should have bailed on the season after fulfilling his eligibility requirements (i.e., attending fall semester classes). But now he looks like a seer. Now he looks like a man merely speaking an obvious truth, which is that players such as Zion Williamson are not really college students, but valuable commodities compelled to spend a season in what amounts to a fancy waiting room.

As such, the top priority should not be dozing through a lecture on Nathaniel Hawthorne or Sir Francis Bacon. It should be protecting the assets.

And if that makes a farce of the entire notion of Zion Williamson playing college basketball, so be it. Because it is a farce. The NBA's rule makes it so.

Class dismissed. So to speak.