Freelance Friday: State Bias and Recruiting Rankings

Freelance Fridays is a semi-regular series on Nylon Calculus where we solicit and publish basketball analytics work submitted by readers. This week’s edition is from Thomas O’Farrell and concerns the degree to which high school recruiting rankings might be subject to regional bias. Thomas is a lifelong fan of basketball and an avid recreational player. From the suburbs outside of Philadelphia, he’s a Sixers fan looking forward to the future. His favorite topic is forecasting player development and how to better evaluate it.

Questions, comments or submissions for Freelance Fridays should be directed to TheNylonCalculus at gmail dot com

The 2016 USA Today Basketball All-Americans were a surprising bunch. With the exception of Ben Simmons and Jamal Murray, there is a conspicuous lack of former top ten high school prospects on the list.

This year it was less heralded players coming from states not considered to be basketball hotbeds that ended up making a huge impact. Jarrod Uthoff was the 90th ranked recruit in his high school class and from the state of Iowa, Georges Niang was ranked 56th and from Massachusetts, and Kris Dunn was ranked 23rd and from Connecticut. This didn’t stop them from all eventually becoming All-Americans, and when it came time for the NBA draft, Kris Dunn was picked 5th overall, Niang was picked 50th, and Uthoff played with the Sacramento Kings Summer League team before signing a with Toronto as undrafted free agent. These three players slid under the radar coming out of high school, and this can be attributed to one factor they all share: they didn’t come from huge states known for producing basketball talent.

None of them came from California, Florida, Texas or Illinois, and the case can be made that if they did, they likely would’ve been ranked much higher out of high school.

High school recruiting rankings are filled with players from the larger states. Players hailing from these states typically take up an inordinate amount of these rankings, even when considering their populations. It has been a widely accepted notion that players from these bigger states will play against better competition, and will be more ready for both college and the pros than someone from a state like Iowa, who won’t be able to play against top flight competition and will be capable of coasting against inferior competition. However, as is the case with many widely accepted notions, there is no respectable study proving that states such as California, Florida, Texas and Illinois are justified in taking up such a large portion of the rankings, or whether high school players from these states really turn out to be better than the rest.

My methodology to determine overachieving and underachieving states was to compile certain attributes for the top 100 high school recruits from the 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 recruiting classes. For this cohort of about 500 players, each player would be rewarded a point if they met the criteria for win shares, and a point if they met the criteria in the draft. The criteria for each are outlined below. If they received a point in each category they were labeled an overachiever, if they received a point in one category but not the other they would be meeting expectations, and a point in neither category would result in them underachieving. A state with a large amount of overachievers and those meeting expectations has clearly been underrated, and the states with large amount of underachievers have been overrated.

Players met the “achievement expectation” for the recruiting rank based on the following scheme:

Meanwhile, the “draft expectation” criteria is set forth below:

498 players were analyzed using these scales (certain special cases were disregarded), and the results were 88 (18%) overachievers, 188 (38%) meeting expectations and 222 (45%) underachievers.

The players were then grouped by state. Each state was awarded 2 points for each overachiever, 1 point for each player meeting expectations, and 0 points for each underachiever. Taking the average for each state and subtracting the national average of 0.73 gives each state’s score. A positive numbers meant the state’s recruits had been underrated as a whole, while a negative number indicated the reverse. I then multiplied by the number of players in each state divided by 10 (The average number of players per state). This was to differentiate between the bigger states that produced a large number of overachievers and underachievers and the states that only produced a few, as a significant sample size deviating one way or the other is more indicative than a smaller one.

For example, Iowa had top 4 top 100 players over this 6 year period, Marcus Paige, Adam Woodbury, Jarrod Uthoff and Harrison Barnes.

Iowa produced 2 overachievers, 1 player who met expectations, and 1 underachiever, for a sum of 5. This was then divided by the number of players from Iowa (4) to get 1.25. 1.25 is then subtracted by the national number of 0.73 for a difference of .52. This is quite a large difference, however because Iowa only produced 4 players it doesn’t indicate a significant deviation. To represent this we multiply the difference of .52 times the number of players from Iowa (4) and divide it by 10. Iowa’s score is .208. Because this number is positive, it is clear that Iowa had been an underrated state for high school basketball.

The results for each state are shown on the heat map below, with green representing an underrated a state, and the darker the green the more underrated. Red represents the overrated states, with dark red being most overrated and light yellow being only slightly overrated. If a state is white, it means no top 100 recruits came from that area during the sample period.

Significant takeaways

While the data doesn’t suggest recruiters should completely abandon the large, populous states in favor of small states, it does suggest that certain states have a knack for producing overachieving talent. While other factors can be at play here, including coaching once in college, the scale and scope of this analysis suggests that recruiters and those ranking the players should buy a heavy winter coat and spend more time scouting in Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, Missouri and Canada during the basketball season and head to Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi when they need some time to thaw out. Such a schedule appears to be one way to “overachieve” in recruiting today.