As we noted in Monday’s Morning Five post, the guys at Basketball Prospectus put together an interesting list evaluating the performance of last year’s top 100 freshmen. The piece compares their freshman year results (rated #1-#100) with how they were ranked in the preseason coming out of high school. Of course, this list is subjective but author Drew Cannon nails it using statistics to back up his rankings. The results are a mixed bag. While the #1 recruit (Anthony Davis) finished as the top freshman, and four of the top six recruits turned in top six freshman season performances, there was tremendous fluctuation with the other players. Four of the top 20 freshman performers jumped up at least 40 slots from where they were ranked coming out of high school. The most fascinating player in our view is Trey Burke, who entered college as the #84 player in his class and finished the season at #5 on Cannon’s list. How does such a player slip through the cracks, and what do these findings tell us about the value of recruiting rankings as they relate to immediate success?
Obviously all years are markedly different, so there’s no definite conclusion to draw from just one year of data. But we took a look at the list and noted a trend. For the most part, there is not as much fluctuation at the top of these rankings as you might expect, and Burke remains a massive outlier. Consider that nine freshman players turned pro after last season, and all of them finished in the top 14 of this list. All nine of the pros were originally ranked in the top 17 last preseason, except for Moe Harkless (#39). That makes Burke such an odd case, as the #84 player from high school who finished fifth in Cannon’s performance rankings and nearly went pro after one year.
What’s interesting is not only how far Burke jumped in performance (79 spots), but how impactful he was compared to other players around him. Consider that Joseph Uchebo and Sim Bhullar, two names that many fans have probably never heard of, were the two players ranked directly in front of Burke in the preseason top 100 rankings. Neither player saw the floor at a Division I school last season, while Burke was co-Big Ten Freshman of the Year and the leading scorer for the co-Big Ten Champion Michigan Wolverines. Uchebo spent last season on Chipola Junior College while Bhullar redshirted at New Mexico State. Of all the players ranked in the 80s coming into last season, only Anthony Gill joined Burke as a top-50 performer, and he came in at #34 for the great minutes he was able to log on the SEC’s last-place team (South Carolina). Based on this year of limited data, it’s more likely for a player ranked in the 80s to not see any action as a freshman than to have a real impact in year one.
Burke is also the only one of the aforementioned ‘top 20 players who jumped 40-plus spots’ that turned in a legitimate all-conference performance during the season. The other players in his category are D’Angelo Harrison of St. John’s (jumped from #64 to #10), Chasson Randle of Stanford (#60 to #17), and Ryan Anderson of Boston College (#93 to #20). But these three players all benefited from earning major minutes on poor teams just as Gill did. Stanford wasn’t as bad as St. John’s, USC, or BC, but the Cardinal finished 10-8 in a weak Pac-12. Regardless, none of these players had anywhere near the overall impact of Burke, a top point guard in the country and bona fide leader of the co-champions of the top conference. Even BP notes that Randle was “just okay” besides being a deadly three-point shooter. Harrison performed admirably in a tumultuous situation at St. John’s, but he was given a long leash to make mistakes and speed up his development on a 13-19 team. It’s tough to put him in the same class as Burke, though he comes the closest in terms of greatly exceeding expectations on a meaningful level.
While one season obviously doesn’t tell the whole story of a player’s impact, this exercise serves an important purpose in identifying immediate freshmen contributors. Because of the current “one-and-done” rule that allows players to enter the pros after one season plus the pressure that coaches have to win right away, there is a greater desire from both parties for freshmen to become impact players in their first year. Elite programs usually cannot succeed without high-performing freshmen so the need to find significant freshmen contributors is quite high on a coach’s list of responsibilities. It is best not to expect elite impact from a freshmen who was not a top prospect, but Trey Burke worked wonders for Michigan and is a major reason why the Wolverines are expected to be national contenders next season. We will have to wait and see if there is another player like him on this year’s top 100 recruiting list who turns from afterthought to All-American in just one short year.
Evan Jacoby is a regular contributor for RTC. You can find him @evanjacoby on Twitter.