Indiana Basketball: Romeo Langford Appreciative Of Time At IU
Romeo Langford admitted he would have liked to have the choice of choosing college or going straight to the NBA coming out of high school. That said, the former Indiana guard still appreciates his time in Bloomington and would still pick college even if the circumstances were different.
"I don't know (if I would've come out of high school), to be honest," Langford told reporters Friday at the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago. "I enjoyed myself in college and I felt like I learned a lot. Felt like it was a good little stepping stone for me for the NBA. It would be nice if you had the option to go straight to the NBA or go to college first."
The 2005 NBA Draft marked the last time the league allowed high school prospects to declare and try to make the league. Under a new collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players that year, a new age limit was established that required high school prospects to either turn 19 no later than Dec. 31 of the year of their draft and be at least one year removed from graduating high school.
Those parameters took effect beginning with the 2006 draft and have remained in place ever since, though the league sent a proposal to its players association earlier this year to lower the age from 19 to 18 - a change that would take affect for the 2022 NBA Draft.
Langford said if the current rules weren't in place when he was a senior at New Albany (Ind.) High, he wouldn't have been ready to make the jump straight from high school to the NBA. He attributed this to not being physically and mentally mature enough to go against much older, more established players at that time.
"I just feel like my body matured at the college level, being able to go against some guys that are older than me instead of going straight to the NBA and going against guys that already have a name for themselves and are already grown men," Langford said. "I felt like I got that time in college to help me mature as a young man physically and mentally."
The former Indiana All-Star's lone season in Bloomington wasn't perfect by any means.
While he led IU in scoring at 16.5 points per game, Langford told ESPN he played through a torn ligament in his right thumb - which would be on his shooting hand - for most of the season. The injury was reportedly sustained in practice prior to IU's Big Ten-ACC Challenge matchup at Duke and surgically repaired last month. Langford shot 53 percent from inside the arc but made just 27 percent of his 3-point attempts in 2018-19.
"I had that little slump with shooting, sometimes during the season or during the game things wouldn't go my way, we didn't win that much," Langford said. "The hardest part was just to keep working hard, see the light at the end of the tunnel, the reason why you wake up every day, working out in the morning, working out in the afternoon."
Even with the adversity he faced, Langford still views his time at IU as formative in his development toward becoming a professional basketball player.
"I would say the hardest part (of making the NBA) is, in high school, the majority of the time, everything's going your way," Langford said. "So now, once you keep going up in the level of playing basketball, whether that's college or the NBA, you're going to go through those times where you meet someone or something that's not going to go your way, but that's the time for you to show how resilient you are and keep pushing. Don't give up. Everything's going to be good in the long run if you just keep working hard."
The 2019 NBA Draft will be held June 20 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York and televised by ESPN.
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