From heroes to zeroes?
A look at the whether the NCAA tournament really produces NBA talent
By Neil Paine | Basketball-Reference.com
ESPN INSIDER
As appealing as the one-and-done craziness of the NCAA tournament is to casual observers, March Madness also represents an interesting battle among hardcore fans over the soul of basketball.
Some sticklers have long devoted themselves to the college game as a "purer" form of the sport, devoid of the supposed flash-and-dash that plagues the pros. On the other side of the aisle, though, the argument is simple: The NBA features higher-caliber basketball with better players. Case closed, right?
In many ways, it's getting harder to avoid the NBA devotees' argument. As I wrote for Basketball Prospectus a year ago, the last few decades have seen the college game become less and less relevant in terms of producing NBA stars.
<OFFER>Between 2000 and 2012, nearly half of all First- or Second-Team All-NBA slots were filled by players who bypassed the NCAA entirely (thanks to the preps-to-pros phenomenon, which produced a startling number of the post-Jordan generation's signature stars). At the same time, college standouts -- as measured by All-America team nods -- have gone on to NBA All-Star careers just 13.3 percent of the time since 2000, down from 42 percent in the early-to-mid-1980s.
However, that larger trend isn't manifesting itself in such a glaring way when it comes to the stars of each individual NCAA tournament. While it's hard to argue that the college game hasn't suffered from talent erosion and a lack of superstar power ever since the initial wave of high schoolers made their exodus to the NBA in the mid-1990s (not even the league's controversial 2006 age-limit rule has completely stemmed the tide), the simple truth is that, with a few major exceptions, the most memorable performers of a given NCAA tournament were never actually very great players, even during college basketball's golden age.
Empirically, we can see this by looking at the NCAA's official Final Four All-Tournament Teams over the years. Since the college finales of the first crop of players who debuted after the NBA-ABA merger in 1976-77, there have been 37 All-Tournament Teams named. While there were a number of standouts -- Michael Jordan, etc. -- in the group, the average player in that group had an NBA career roughly as valuable as those of Sherman Douglas or Joe Barry Carroll. And that's the average -- 32 of the 186 players failed to make the NBA at all, and still more had pro careers of little to no note whatsoever.
The trend is clearly headed in a negative direction, in terms of the quality of NBA careers that All-Tournament selections have enjoyed in recent seasons. However, there are plenty of caveats. First, the pattern of declining NBA quality over time is a weak one at best, with a correlation of 0.1 since 1976. Secondly, the data are skewed by some serious outliers in the early-to-mid-1980s, without which there would be essentially no pattern at all.
As noted in my previous study of the declining quality of NCAA basketball's signature stars, that period of time was a golden age in terms of college superstars translating to great success at the next level. In the six tournaments between 1979 and 1984, the Final Four's All-Tournament Teams included Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Isiah Thomas, James Worthy, Sam Perkins and Mark Aguirre, to name just a few. Whether on a conscious level or not, that degree of star power is the standard to which subsequent tournaments have been held, and aside from brief blips like 1992 (Grant Hill, Chris Webber et al), they simply don't measure up.
The trouble with that line of thinking, though, is that the 1979-84 run was historically unprecedented by the standards of the tournaments that preceded it as well. In 1976, the All-Tournament Team was Tom Abernethy, Kent Benson, Rickey Green, Marques Johnson and Scott May, a group no more or less accomplished than the typical selections of the past decade (statistically, the 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2008 teams are likely to produce more total value than 1976, when it's all said and done). And I'd venture to say that last year's All-Tournament brigade is going to at least match those of 1977 (Walter Davis, Bo Ellis, Butch Lee, Cedric Maxwell, Mike O'Koren, Jerome Whitehead) or 1978 (Ron Brewer, Jack Givens, Mike Gminski, Rick Robey, Jim Spanarkel). The more you dig into history, the more you see that 1979-84 was the exception, not the rule.
<!-- begin inline 1 -->Top 10 All-NCAA Tournament teams
Ranked by NBA career quality
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<!-- end inline 1 --><!-- begin inline 2 -->Bottom 5 All-NCAA Tournament teams
Ranked by NBA career quality
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<!-- end inline 2 -->That's not to say the state of the NCAA tournament's stars is completely rosy; while 2012 did produce a good crop, it's looking like the teams of 2009-11 are nothing if not dud-laden, aside from Kemba Walker, Gordon Hayward and Ty Lawson (none of whom will be Hall of Famers, but all of whom should at least produce careers on par with the Raymond Feltons and Kirk Hinrichs of the world). But of the eight years leading up to that relative down stretch, only one (the horrendous, Chris Wilcox-led 2002 group) was truly bad, and most were above historical par in terms of producing NBA contributors.
In short, the NCAA tournament is fairly random (it's called March Madness for a reason), and that means the college game's biggest stars are not always going to align with the most outstanding players in the tournament itself.
The All-Tournament Team enjoyed a remarkable heyday in the early-to-mid-1980s, when future superstars like Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing passed through the Big Dance with flying colors en route to even bigger things on the NBA's stage, but that was an historical fluke, not the norm. While the overall quality of NCAA basketball is declining over time, the ability of the tournament to let future stars shine is no weaker or stronger than it ever was, 1979-84 excepted.
Most great NCAA tournament players are going to have weak (if not nonexistent) NBA careers, but that's OK. In fact, it's essentially the way things have been for 40 years.
A look at the whether the NCAA tournament really produces NBA talent
By Neil Paine | Basketball-Reference.com
ESPN INSIDER
As appealing as the one-and-done craziness of the NCAA tournament is to casual observers, March Madness also represents an interesting battle among hardcore fans over the soul of basketball.
Some sticklers have long devoted themselves to the college game as a "purer" form of the sport, devoid of the supposed flash-and-dash that plagues the pros. On the other side of the aisle, though, the argument is simple: The NBA features higher-caliber basketball with better players. Case closed, right?
In many ways, it's getting harder to avoid the NBA devotees' argument. As I wrote for Basketball Prospectus a year ago, the last few decades have seen the college game become less and less relevant in terms of producing NBA stars.
<OFFER>Between 2000 and 2012, nearly half of all First- or Second-Team All-NBA slots were filled by players who bypassed the NCAA entirely (thanks to the preps-to-pros phenomenon, which produced a startling number of the post-Jordan generation's signature stars). At the same time, college standouts -- as measured by All-America team nods -- have gone on to NBA All-Star careers just 13.3 percent of the time since 2000, down from 42 percent in the early-to-mid-1980s.
However, that larger trend isn't manifesting itself in such a glaring way when it comes to the stars of each individual NCAA tournament. While it's hard to argue that the college game hasn't suffered from talent erosion and a lack of superstar power ever since the initial wave of high schoolers made their exodus to the NBA in the mid-1990s (not even the league's controversial 2006 age-limit rule has completely stemmed the tide), the simple truth is that, with a few major exceptions, the most memorable performers of a given NCAA tournament were never actually very great players, even during college basketball's golden age.
Empirically, we can see this by looking at the NCAA's official Final Four All-Tournament Teams over the years. Since the college finales of the first crop of players who debuted after the NBA-ABA merger in 1976-77, there have been 37 All-Tournament Teams named. While there were a number of standouts -- Michael Jordan, etc. -- in the group, the average player in that group had an NBA career roughly as valuable as those of Sherman Douglas or Joe Barry Carroll. And that's the average -- 32 of the 186 players failed to make the NBA at all, and still more had pro careers of little to no note whatsoever.
The trend is clearly headed in a negative direction, in terms of the quality of NBA careers that All-Tournament selections have enjoyed in recent seasons. However, there are plenty of caveats. First, the pattern of declining NBA quality over time is a weak one at best, with a correlation of 0.1 since 1976. Secondly, the data are skewed by some serious outliers in the early-to-mid-1980s, without which there would be essentially no pattern at all.
As noted in my previous study of the declining quality of NCAA basketball's signature stars, that period of time was a golden age in terms of college superstars translating to great success at the next level. In the six tournaments between 1979 and 1984, the Final Four's All-Tournament Teams included Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Isiah Thomas, James Worthy, Sam Perkins and Mark Aguirre, to name just a few. Whether on a conscious level or not, that degree of star power is the standard to which subsequent tournaments have been held, and aside from brief blips like 1992 (Grant Hill, Chris Webber et al), they simply don't measure up.
The trouble with that line of thinking, though, is that the 1979-84 run was historically unprecedented by the standards of the tournaments that preceded it as well. In 1976, the All-Tournament Team was Tom Abernethy, Kent Benson, Rickey Green, Marques Johnson and Scott May, a group no more or less accomplished than the typical selections of the past decade (statistically, the 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2008 teams are likely to produce more total value than 1976, when it's all said and done). And I'd venture to say that last year's All-Tournament brigade is going to at least match those of 1977 (Walter Davis, Bo Ellis, Butch Lee, Cedric Maxwell, Mike O'Koren, Jerome Whitehead) or 1978 (Ron Brewer, Jack Givens, Mike Gminski, Rick Robey, Jim Spanarkel). The more you dig into history, the more you see that 1979-84 was the exception, not the rule.
<!-- begin inline 1 -->Top 10 All-NCAA Tournament teams
Ranked by NBA career quality
| Year | Players | Average |
|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Patrick Ewing (61.5), Sleepy Floyd (21), Michael Jordan (117), Sam Perkins (36.3), James Worthy (34.3) | 54.0 |
| 1979 | Mark Aguirre (29), Larry Bird (75.6), Gary Garland (0.1), Magic Johnson (71.4), Greg Kelser (2.5) | 35.7 |
| 1984 | Patrick Ewing (61.5), Alvin Franklin (0), Michael Graham (0), Hakeem Olajuwon (89), Michael Young (0.3) | 30.2 |
| 1992 | Grant Hill (51.4), Bobby Hurley (-1.7), Christian Laettner (25.8), Jalen Rose (21.7), Chris Webber (48.8) | 29.2 |
| 2001 | Shane Battier (35.8), Mike Dunleavy (19.2), Richard Jefferson (31), Jason Williams (19.7), Loren Woods (0.6) | 21.3 |
| 1983 | Thurl Bailey (11.4), Sidney Lowe (1.6), Hakeem Olajuwon (89), Milt Wagner (-0.2), Dereck Whittenburg (0) | 20.4 |
| 2007 | Corey Brewer (11.9), Lee Humphrey (0), Al Horford (37), Greg Oden (2.3), Mike Conley (41.6) | 18.6 |
| 2003 | Carmelo Anthony (53.6), Gerry McNamara (0), Nick Collison (14), Kirk Hinrich (25.3), Keith Langford (0) | 18.6 |
| 1993 | George Lynch (14.1), Jamal Mashburn (19.4), Eric Montross (2.7), Chris Webber (48.8), Donald Williams (0) | 17.0 |
| 2008 | Mario Chalmers (17.2), Darrell Arthur (8.5), Brandon Rush (7.4), Chris Douglas-Roberts (1.4), Derrick Rose (50.4) | 17.0 |
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<!-- end inline 1 --><!-- begin inline 2 -->Bottom 5 All-NCAA Tournament teams
Ranked by NBA career quality
| Year | Players | Average |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Kemba Walker (24.8), Jeremy Lamb (2.2), Matt Howard (0), Shelvin Mack (3.2), Jamie Skeen (0) | 6.0 |
| 1991 | Anderson Hunt (0), Bobby Hurley (-1.7), Christian Laettner (25.8), Bill McCaffrey (0), Mark Randall (-0.1) | 4.8 |
| 1986 | Mark Alarie (1.2), Tommy Amaker (0), Johnny Dawkins (9.3), Pervis Ellison (8.7), Billy Thompson (2.6) | 4.4 |
| 2002 | Juan Dixon (1.8), Lonny Baxter (0), Chris Wilcox (9.9), Dane Fife (0), Kyle Hornsby (0) | 2.3 |
| 1995 | Toby Bailey (0), Clint McDaniel (0.1), Ed O'Bannon (-0.2), Bryant Reeves (2.7), Corliss Williamson (8) | 2.1 |
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<!-- end inline 2 -->That's not to say the state of the NCAA tournament's stars is completely rosy; while 2012 did produce a good crop, it's looking like the teams of 2009-11 are nothing if not dud-laden, aside from Kemba Walker, Gordon Hayward and Ty Lawson (none of whom will be Hall of Famers, but all of whom should at least produce careers on par with the Raymond Feltons and Kirk Hinrichs of the world). But of the eight years leading up to that relative down stretch, only one (the horrendous, Chris Wilcox-led 2002 group) was truly bad, and most were above historical par in terms of producing NBA contributors.
In short, the NCAA tournament is fairly random (it's called March Madness for a reason), and that means the college game's biggest stars are not always going to align with the most outstanding players in the tournament itself.
The All-Tournament Team enjoyed a remarkable heyday in the early-to-mid-1980s, when future superstars like Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing passed through the Big Dance with flying colors en route to even bigger things on the NBA's stage, but that was an historical fluke, not the norm. While the overall quality of NCAA basketball is declining over time, the ability of the tournament to let future stars shine is no weaker or stronger than it ever was, 1979-84 excepted.
Most great NCAA tournament players are going to have weak (if not nonexistent) NBA careers, but that's OK. In fact, it's essentially the way things have been for 40 years.
