East Rutherford, N.J. ? The guessing game on the teeny bops is gone now, extinguished with that sinking, smarmy feeling for NBA executives that came with trolling high school gyms for prospects. The draft grew a little older Wednesday night, but it still could get so much better in the States.

“I was a proponent of the 20-year-old minimum age, but (David Stern) did the best thing he could do in raising it to just one year,” Nets’ president Rod Thorn said. “To me, anything was better than the way it was.”

The rule to end the prom-to-the-pros player has eliminated the high school senior in the draft, forcing kids to wait a year upon graduation before getting eligible. The union wouldn’t go for a 20-year-old age requirement, so Stern settled on the compromise.

This wasn’t the end of his fight, but just the beginning. During the NBA Finals, the commissioner called out the United States feeder system for failing to fulfill its mission of developing our best young talent in the global market. Just because LeBron James and Dwyane Wade have emerged as the next generation of superstars, just as Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett did in the 1990s, doesn’t mean our development program within amateur basketball isn’t fundamentally flawed.

“The Darwin theory,” Thorn said, acknowledging the aberrations such as James and Wade who come along despite the circumstances and surroundings. The great ones always rise, but it’s the next level of basketball player who maybe never fulfills his possibilities.

Truth be told, the United States has slowed down in its development of versatile, multitalented big men. Greg Oden, the rising Ohio State freshman, would have been the No. 1 pick this year, but he’s the rarest of prodigies now. Some refined young centers come along, but the history of our games tells you there should be more arriving off the assembly line.

Let’s face it: too many Eddy Currys, too few Odens.

The U.S. is bleeding jobs in pro basketball, the way the automobile industry started to do in the 1970s. It took an assault from overseas to make America rethink the way it made cars, something that still hasn’t happened with basketball.

Getting the high school kids out of the draft has made the selecting process a little easier, but not much. When Thorn makes his choices, he does it on case-by-case basis. Even so, the patterns are unmistakable.

“The bigger kids in the U.S., by and large, are not as skilled as the comparable player in Europe by 18 and 19 years old,” Thorn said. He knows it’s unfair to generalize about every amateur basketball program in the U.S. – ours aren’t all bad, and theirs aren’t all great – but he’s spent enough time in American and European gyms these past several years to see the differences.

The system still needs work, something that could begin with the NBA investing more money in America’s summer basketball system. Stern can raise the age minimum again, get it to 20, but it doesn’t go the distance to solve our problems. We can still be better, a lot better, something the rest of the world keeps reminding us every year on draft night.