High School Recruiting Ranking vs. NBA Success
3rd August 2011
High school recruiting rankings, particularly the historical variety, have long fascinated me. There's something really interesting about looking back at them with the benefit of hindsight, and comparing a player's actual career trajectory to that which was predicted when he was just 18 years old.
With that idea in mind, I put together this post to see how often players of a certain ranking end up with a certain type of NBA career. For every player, I classified them in one of six categories:
- Superstar - Either made 1st-team All-NBA or was Top-5 in MVP voting at least once in his career
- All-Star - Made an All-Star roster at least once in his career
- Starter - Finished top-5 on a team in games started at least once in his career
- Regular - Not a starter, but played at least half of a team's games in a season at least once in his career
- Scrub - Not a regular, but played at least 1 NBA game in his career
- Did Not Play - Never played an NBA game
I then looked at the recruiting rankings on this site, gathering the data from 1998-2003 ('03 being the final HS class for which you can reasonably say every player has been given a full chance to reach his NBA potential -- if a guy hasn't made it by now, it's probably never going to happen). Based on their national prospect rankings coming out of high school, how many players ended up in each category in the NBA?
| Rank | Did Not Play | Scrub | Regular | Starter | All-Star | Superstar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1-5 | 16% | 10% | 16% | 35% | 16% | 6% |
| 6-10 | 38% | 10% | 10% | 31% | 7% | 3% |
| 11-25 | 46% | 16% | 16% | 19% | 2% | 0% |
| 26-50 | 70% | 9% | 7% | 12% | 2% | 0% |
| 51-100 | 82% | 5% | 7% | 5% | 1% | 0% |
| Rank | Did Not Play | Scrub | Regular | Starter | All-Star | Superstar |
| Top5 | 16% | 10% | 16% | 35% | 16% | 6% |
| Top10 | 27% | 10% | 13% | 33% | 12% | 5% |
| Top25 | 38% | 14% | 15% | 25% | 6% | 2% |
| Top50 | 54% | 12% | 11% | 18% | 4% | 1% |
| Top100 | 68% | 9% | 9% | 12% | 2% | 1% |
This is a sobering reminder of how elite the NBA's talent level really is.
Even if you're one of the 100 best high school players in all of America, there's almost a 70% chance you never play in the NBA, and almost an 80% chance that, at best, you'll be a journeyman scrub who doesn't play regularly. And while top-5 talents have a decent probability of being an NBA starter or better (58%), after that the drop-off is steep: 41% for players ranked 6-10, 21% for #11-25, 14% for #26-50, and only 6% for players ranked outside the top 50 (including just a 1% chance of being an All-Star).
Not to harsh the mellow of any budding BMOCs out there, but the typical top prospect's NBA career is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short.
For the full list of recruits used in the study (and the categories they fell into), click here.
Posted in Analysis, NCAA, Prospects | 30 Comments »