One of our spring rituals when the NBA playoffs arrive is to analyze the makeup of the teams through the lens of what colleges and conferences the key contributors passed through on their way to the L (assuming they went to college at all). There is talent on every team in the NBA, but it takes more than stockpiled talent to ensure success – experience, competent role players, solid team chemistry, and coaching all come into play. This exercise shows us where the best of the best in basketball are coming from. Are the big conferences over- or underrepresented – and if so, which ones? Which schools are consistently putting talent on the top NBA teams – who is missing? What about the foreign player invasion of the past decade – how is that playing out? To answer these questions and more, we’ll examine both the key contributors and the starters of each playoff team, to see if anything in the results surprises us.

The methodology used ensures that we only assessed key contributors on each playoff team. First, we only considered players who averaged at least ten minutes per game this season, figuring that a benchwarmer like Paul Shirley hasn’t contributed much toward the team’s on-court success. Second, each player must have played in at least half of his team’s games (if he was traded during the season, the games with the previous team were included as well). Finally, with respect to selecting starters, we only considered those who were projected to start for their teams during the playoffs (sorry Wiz duo Agent Zero and Caron Butler). This process left us with 168 key contributors and 80 starters spread over sixteen teams. Read the rest of this entry »