In an interview on sports radio this week, Gary Williams got a little indignant about the charge that he wasn’t a great recruiter, claiming that when he was the coach at Maryland, his teams had more future NBA players than any Atlantic Coast Conference school aside from Duke and North Carolina. While I think that Williams catches more flak than he deserves for not recruiting well, I also think that his claim probably isn’t true. Every source that I have been able to find has Georgia Tech as a strong third place in the ACC when it comes to NBA players during his tenure (essentially, the 1990s and 2000s). Even if by some miscount, it’s pretty clear that Georgia Tech has had better pros than Maryland during that time. The Terrapins had Joe Smith, Steve Francis, Steve Blake, and Walt Williams, while GT has had Chris Bosh, Stephon Marbury, Kenny Anderson, and Thaddeus Young. At best, Maryland was the fourth best school in the ACC in producing NBA talent during Williams’ tenure, and that’s only if you agree that quality trumps quantity and ignore Wake Forest‘s Tim Duncan, Josh Howard and Chris Paul.
Gary Williams Made Up For His Mediocre Recruiting With Excellent Coaching
Still, I don’t bring this up to condemn Williams for overstating his record, but to bring up a point about recruiting and coaching. Dan Hanner did an interesting little study that he wrote up for this year’s College Basketball Prospectus where he set out to evaluate how important it is to get great recruits. He looked at recruits from 1999-2011 and put them into different categories based on their recruiting class rank and where they went to college and then looked to see how many minutes they played and what their average offensive efficiency rating was. At Maryland, unranked recruits played 51.2% of the minutes while recruits ranked 100-10 played the remainder of the minutes. The unranked recruits produced an average offensive efficiency rating of 104.2 while their ranked peers produced at 106.4 mark. Now compare this to Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets had unranked recruits use 28.1% of the minutes while recruits ranked from 100-10 used 67.1% (the remaining 4.8% went to top ten recruits). Here is where things get interesting: the unranked players produce at an offensive efficiency rating of 99.1 while the ranked recruits (outside of the top ten) posted a rate of 103.3. While Georgia Tech had top recruits playing more minutes than Maryland, the unranked recruits of Maryland ended up playing better on average than Georgia Tech’s ranked recruits. For Williams, recruiting just didn’t matter as much because he had a knack for making unranked players better than their ranked counterparts at Georgia Tech. That’s the key takeaway here — that the power of a talented coach can overcome recruiting rankings.
So, yes, I think Williams misspoke when he said that Maryland was the third best producer of NBA talent in the ACC during his tenure. I also happen to think that Georgia Tech’s ability to out-recruit Maryland ultimately didn’t matter too much — the Terps are the ones with the 2002 national championship banner hanging in the rafters, not the Yellow Jackets.