Another Look at Basketball Recruiting

ACC Basketball Recruiting College Basketball General NCS Basketball61

Let’s put the full disclosure up front—-I’m not a star gazer and I frequently laugh at those who are. But with that being said, I was really surprised by a piece DU put up several months ago about the recruiting of top-ranked high school players.

Among the things that I’ve learned over the years is that recruiting classes play no games against each other. So the value of recruiting class rankings is limited under the best of circumstances. One other thing that I’ve learned is that when the “stat” being touted is not consistent with the results on the field/court, then someone is looking at the wrong thing.

In general, I’m a bottom-line type of guy. If the end results are unacceptable, it’s not likely that my opinion will be swayed by those looking for bright spots amongst the crap. Which brings us back to DU’s entry….

The results of the basketball team over the last decade have ranged from mediocre to miserable. The results parallel my opinion of both the coaching and recruiting over the last decade. So I put some effort in figuring out a different way to provide some objective “measurement” of State’s recruiting to see if my initial judgment was off somehow.

There are several different ways to judge “talent” through stats like high school production, recruiting rankings, college production, draft status, and professional career. Let’s be clear…I like to see State sign highly-rated recruits and I like to see State’s players do well in the pros (NBA and Europe). But what I care most about is their production in college. So I decided to compile the All-ACC lists as a way to gage their production at the college level.

Here are the State players that were voted onto one of the All-ACC teams (minus the rookie team) over the last 10 years. I didn’t include the freshman team because it is a little like the tallest-midget contest.

 

2002

First Team

Anthony Grundy

2003

First Team

Julius Hodge

2003

Defensive

Clifford Crawford

2004

First Team

Julius Hodge

2004

Sec Team

Marcus Melvin

2005

Sec Team

Julius Hodge

2006

Third Team

Cam Bennerman

2006

Defensive

Cedric Simmons

2006

Hon Mention

Cedric Simmons

2007

Third Team

Brandon Costner

2007

Hon Mention

Ben McCauley

2008

Hon Mention

J.J. Hickson

2009

Def Hon Men

Courtney Fells

2010

Sec Team

Tracy Smith

2011

Hon Mention

Tracy Smith

 

(The years link to the press releases found at theacc.com)

 

The purpose of recruiting is to collect the best possible players and build a team. For State, you have to go all the way back to 2002 and Anthony Grundy to find a ball-handler selected to one of the three All-ACC teams. I couldn’t say how many times I’ve looked at State’s lineup and wished that we had a point guard as good as Justin Gainey (solid but not spectacular). When your coaches’ recruiting consistently leaves a huge hole in the most important position on the court, then I don’t think that any rational evaluation could conclude that the recruiting has been “good”.

Now for context…Let’s summarize the All-ACC awards for all 12 ACC teams over the last 10 years (noting that expansion occurred in years 4 and 5 of this 10 year stretch):

 

 

 

1

2

3

HM

D

DHM

Total

Duke

15

5

6

3

9

3

41

UNC

8

7

8

3

5

3

36

MD

4

6

6

3

3

1

23

WF

3

8

6

—

5

—

22

CU

2

2

4

3

4

5

20

FSU

3

2

4

1

8

—

18

GT

—

5

5

2

2

3

17

NCSU

3

3

2

4

2

1

15

UVa

3

5

1

4

—

—

13
               

UM

2

2

3

2

1

—

10

VT

3

2

4

4

5

2

20
               

BC

4

3

2

—

1

—

10

 

I think that my poor opinion of State’s recruiting was pretty accurate after all.   The article that DU referenced only looked at the highest ranked players.   The thrust of his entry was to point out that State has done fairly well in getting these highly-rated players.   However,  it would be a gross mistake to look at those results and conclude that State’s recruiting has been “good” or even “adequate”.     

You can bring up all of the excuses and future speculation that you would like, but the bottom line remains the bottom line.  State’s poor representation on the All-ACC teams (not to mention the W/L records) shows that the recruiting has been poor regardless of whatever the star-gazers conclude.   The chances of improving the results in the future without making real improvements in the recruiting are slim and none (and Slim has left the building).   

About VaWolf82

Engineer living in Central Va. and senior curmudgeon amongst SFN authors One wife, two kids, one dog, four vehicles on insurance, and four phones on cell plan...looking forward to empty nest status. Graduated 1982

ACC Basketball Recruiting College Basketball General NCS Basketball

61 Responses to Another Look at Basketball Recruiting

  1. VaWolf82 05/16/2011 at 4:26 PM #

    Your argument is that our recruiting classes have not been good.

    Slightly off my point. Sid’s recruiting wasn’t good enough even if there were some highly ranked classes because:
    – There were never enough top players at any one time to accomplish anything.
    – The point guard position has been a huge weakness for most of the last decade.

    Maybe rtpack said it better:

    Sendek…seemed to never have a plan on recruiting players to play as a team….While Sid signed some quality players, he did a poor job of recruiting the right pieces to have a successful team.

    Bottom line….When you don’t have a complete team, your recruiting is not good.

  2. waxhaw 05/16/2011 at 5:26 PM #

    All ACC awards are a terrible way to judge talent. Essentially it’s a self fulfilling prophesy. If your team wins, you will likely get a higher percentage of the accolades.

    If you look at the post season awards, you are likely looking at a team that won more. You could assume they have more talent or you could assume that coaches did a better job.

    Either way, I agree with the conclusion that our team has been poorly coached and lacked top tier talent (at least across the board).

  3. choppack1 05/16/2011 at 6:17 PM #

    It’s not a matter of talent. It’s more a matter of finding the “right” or “acceptable” pieces.

    Sendek’s recruiting was damaged severely by early departures…The following Sendek recruits played in the NBA:
    Harrington
    Grundy
    Wilkins
    Hodge
    Powell
    Simmons

    That’s not bad for 10 years…Unfortunately, only 2 of those guys were here for 4 years. More importantly, the same were the only ones who stayed past their sophomore year.

    Sendek lost other talent who ended up having decent careers elsewhere as well or were highly ranked:
    Ivan Wagner
    Marshall Williams
    Mike Bell
    Trey Guidry
    Mike O’Donnell
    Donald Mejia

    Lowe actually had 3 classes w/ pretty decent talent. Unfortunately, Lowe’s recruiting was his strength – AND until his 5th recruiting class – he was unable to bring in guards capable of consistently performing at an ACC level on both sides of the court.

    Bottom line: Saying State has had a recruiting problem the last 10 years is like saying we have a spending problem. But it’s a unique problem – it’s not that we can’t get elite talent…It’s that we haven’t done a good job finding kids who want to play at NC State for 3 or 4 years. Most schools would love to have had 5 McD AA’s the last 7 years.

  4. wolffpride 05/16/2011 at 6:21 PM #

    System efficacy dictates player performances. You can argue that we could have had better players to play in the respective systems. But I believe more fault falls on the system and not the players involved.

    Sendek’s system was a bogus one. It did not attract elite talent and honestly took away more strengths from players than it did eliminate weaknesses. Critisizing his recruiting is basically pointless when it was the system that is flawed. Meaning that there are very few players that would flourish in his system. I will give credit to James Harden.

    Lowe on the other hand I feel did a good job of recruiting. It did take him a while to find a decent point guard (Lorenzo Brown), which didn’t work out too well since he didn’t qualify. Then when he finally came in he was used as a shooting guard. This fact made me realize that Lowe had no idea how to coach the point guard position (ironic). When I watched VCU make there run in the NCAA tournament I watched there point guard Joey Rodriguez, and couldn’t help but think of Javier Gonzalez…very similar playing styles. I believe that Javier could have evolved into a very effective college point guard had he been given the correct direction.

    The point that I am trying to make is that in order for a coach to have success he must have a way of playing basketball on both ends of the floor that is effective. This is step 1, step 2 would be finding players to fit into this system. If step 1 is flawed then step 2 doesn’t even come into play. A bad coach will always have a bad team, no matter who plays on it. I feel this article is misdirected in its criticism. The coaching style is to blame, not their recruiting. To say that we havent recruited the right players all this time, is to assume that we had effective systems for them to thrive in.

    I have said it before and will say it again. Mark Gottfried has proven himself to be a good coach. I believe that Lowe has left him with a very talented team. Do not be surprised if we end up in the top half of the ACC.

  5. wolffpride 05/16/2011 at 6:27 PM #

    Understand that both former and current players read these blogs. I realize that it is unintentional but your post has insulted all the players of the past 10 years. It is not there fault. A player is only as good as the direction he recieves. I am grateful for every player that has played at our great university, and have no regrets.

  6. tractor57 05/16/2011 at 7:10 PM #

    wolffpride the insulting part should be the lack of success on the court over the last 10 years in total – whatever the cause.

    I for one am NOT satisfied with the status quo but I am energized by the changes I’ve seen over the last year. That goes for our administration even more than the BB team.

  7. VaWolf82 05/16/2011 at 7:38 PM #

    The only people that I’ve insulted are the star-gazers that cling to high school rankings like they are the Holy Grail. Stating that poor recruiting has lead to a decade of mediocre to miserable basketball is merely stating the obvious. Blaming those results only on the coaches is insulting….to everyone’s intelligence.

  8. Wolfy__79 05/16/2011 at 8:33 PM #

    honestly, i scrap all high school rankings.. mcdaa’s players, there are some really talented kids playing in that game.. but it means nothing to me!

    to me, there is a world of talent out there and it takes a eye for IT and most importantly someone that can also put it together. all the talent isn’t on the top 100 rankings.

    i like the numbers you’ve put together here vawolf!! i still feel that we just haven’t had the winner in the right postion (coach) in a very long time. i put it all on the coach! under herb, he didn’t EVER have a true pg role. i recall how painful it was watching some elaborate scheme to bring the darn ball up the court. sid takes over, i liked what i saw from atsur and thought we might be onto something? but still, it never was in any working order.

    the gaps and inconsistencies in our recruiting have been very painful. what good is one mcdaa if the rest of the team wasn’t on the same page. under herb, his teams were full of role players.. sidney’s gaps of talent hurt any goal he was trying to achieve.

    in the end, i don’t care what the incoming ranks are of these players.. if we get wins, that counts. if these kids are developed properly, they get ACC mention in one form or another. a good example of me is most recent, tracy smith. coming into this season he should have been a lock for all ACC.. instead he was out of shape and agruably tanked his chances of this attention and maybe even a pro career. we’ve watched our players get beasted by our ACC opponents and get this attention from the rest of the conference. when a fourth year senior at NC STATE cannot make 1st team, there is something awfully wrong to me.. but i take a much simpler approach. win games, and perspective changes accross the board in the conference.

  9. choppack1 05/16/2011 at 9:54 PM #

    It’s kind of a chicken or the egg thing. Robinson, Sendek and Lowe could have all done better if they had better players – that goes w/out saying.

    I think Robinson was hurt more by a lack of talent than Sendek or Lowe.

    I think Sendek did a solid job preparing his team, but when it came to crunch time his teams did – and still do – have a tendency to tighten up.

    I think Lowe’s biggest problem wasn’t talent allocation. Rather, it was consistently motivating his players and preparing them for a season’s worth of work.

    One thing Sendek found that changed the direction of his program was a player that refused to lose. Every decent team has at least one of those guys – someone who does whatever it takes to win a ball game. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in our collapse against Vandy – he was on the bench w/ 5 fouls.

  10. Tau837 05/16/2011 at 11:43 PM #

    Great post, chop.

    I believe I looked at the link in that previous DU post and saw that Sendek recruited 17 top 100 players during the span evaluated, but 10 of them left the program early, either by transfer or going pro early… with most of those guys leaving before their junior seasons. Another top 100 guy was Levi Watkins, who may have been a lot better if not for injury. That left a fairly small number of top 100 recruits who actually reached upperclassman status in the program over a 10 year period. In a scenario like this, the recruiting rankings could actually be valid and the program’s performance could still be poor.

    That means Lowe recruited 7 top 100 players. But to date, 4 of them (Hickson, Harrow, Leslie, Brown) played only 1 year for the program. Two others (Howell and Painter) have played 2 seasons to date.

    IMO the real problem was not necessarily the recruiting rankings, but is that State got both many fewer seasons out of the 24 top 100 players in that study *and* got less out of the players due to poor coaching.

  11. packhammer 05/17/2011 at 9:53 AM #

    Mea Culpa. My prior post was based on an erroneous reading of the stat chart provided. I got UM confused with UMd. Oops. Nevertheless my mistake actually supports my conclusion. Turgeon will be a dissappointment to Maryland fans. Gary Williams was a good recruiter and a winning coach. He was a maniac too but that is not the issue.

  12. VaWolf82 05/17/2011 at 9:53 AM #

    Surely you guys aren’t claiming that State is the only program that had kids leave early? Kids leave early for all sorts of reasons all over the country. Recruiting has to be good enough to fill the holes that are left when it happens.

  13. Tau837 05/17/2011 at 12:19 PM #

    Of course kids leave other programs early. Can you show me any other program who had 59% of its top 100 players leave early over a 10 year period? I seriously doubt it.

    Furthermore, IIRC, 5 out of Herb’s first 6 top 100 recruits left early. That was a big contributor to the poor results of his first 5 seasons.

    I agree it is the coach’s responsibility to overcome that by either recruiting to fill the holes or making it so kids don’t want to transfer or both. But it is still a fact that the early departures were abnormally high for Herb, especially early on, and that contributed to poor results on the court. Surely you aren’t arguing that…

  14. MP 05/17/2011 at 12:21 PM #

    I understand the hypothesis, although I’m not sure I understand the point. So let’s say that NC State recruiting has been ‘poor’ over the last 10 years due to measureables used…

    IN MY OPINION: If you kept all of the rosters for NC State and Duke exactly as they were in ALL of those years; AND you flipped the full NC State coaching staff with the full Duke coaching staff in ANY/EACH of those years; THEN NC State would be a superior program to Duke right now, regardless of the superior talent of the Duke players.

    My basis: HALL OF FAME COACH and his staff.

  15. VaWolf82 05/17/2011 at 12:43 PM #

    My points are simple:

    – Articles like the one referenced in the first paragraph look at too little data and lead to erroneous conclusions.

    – State’s recruiting has been far worse than many around here think when you look at college production instead of highschool rankings.

    – State has had issues at PG for most of the last decade.

    – Recruiting rankings buoyed by one superstar like JJ Hickson mean nothing when that player leaves quickly for the NBA.

    – A good number of people around here were hoping that Sidney would be retained to help with recruiting. I wanted to show that this was a very bad idea.

  16. VaWolf82 05/17/2011 at 12:50 PM #

    Can you show me any other program who had 59% of its top 100 players leave early over a 10 year period?

    If you want to prove a point, then do the research. Guessing at the results isn’t a convincing argument.

    When early deparatures leave holes in the lineups, then I take that as evidence of poor planning/recruiting by the coaching staff. State’s problems have been much deeper/longer than an off-year here and there while the coaching staff fills those holes.

    State’s W/L results and All-ACC players have both been at the bottom of the league. Both are convincing indictments of the coaching and the recruiting to me.

  17. Wolfy__79 05/17/2011 at 3:52 PM #

    ok.. so two good examples are our neighbors down the road. unc-ch continually reloads its roster with talent. every year they keep getting top tier talent (which hits a bit on va’s point). they have alot of players defect to the nba. duke loses some kids too. but each year they have a brand new flock of stars. i think K does a good job of blending the talent with high caliber role players.

    have we come close to that? imo, hell no. i don’t understand how we have such a hard time with consistent recruiting?

  18. Wolfy__79 05/17/2011 at 3:58 PM #

    no matter how anyone spins it or views the numbers.. after it has all been said and done.. NC STATE “basketball,” saddens me to say, has been PISS POOR… that’s all. simple math. thanks for the read VA!!

  19. choppack1 05/17/2011 at 7:36 PM #

    Va wolf I think you are skipping a step. If you want to look at the talent of a class you’d have to look at their college careers when they transfer or even their nba careers. I think you make a very good point about one and done.

    At the end of the day there are 2 basic recruiting problems coaches have…securing good talent or keeping the talent you have. I know the acc sports journal used to do an analysis at the end of 4 years.

    But saying a class isn’t good based only on what it did at nc state is like saying a girl isn’t good looking because you broke up with her.

  20. choppack1 05/17/2011 at 7:38 PM #

    Another thing…was our recruiting good from 2001 to 2004?

  21. VaWolf82 05/17/2011 at 8:05 PM #

    But saying a class isn’t good based only on what it did at nc state is like saying a girl isn’t good looking because you broke up with her.

    What????? Why do we care about recruiting if not for their production while they are at State?

    Edit….Let me ask a different question:
    – Why should anyone expect for State’s performance in the next 10 years to be better than the last 10 if State doesn’t have any better participation on the All-ACC teams?

  22. VaWolf82 05/17/2011 at 8:11 PM #

    Another thing…was our recruiting good from 2001 to 2004?

    The 2001 class was Hodge, Evitimov, Powell, Watkins, and someone that I’m forgetting. Probably best class since David Thompson.

    The 2002 class was Cam Bennerman and 3 transfers

    The 2003 class was Atsur and 1 transfer

    By the 2004 class I was no longer following recruiting and from the Meatloaf song…Praying for the end of time.

    1 great class, two bad ones, and one that I don’t remember. Why do you ask?

    EDIT
    OK, I cheated…2004 was Grant, Brackman, and Simmons.

    Let me ask you a question. What do you call four consecutive classes with 0 point guards and one combo guard? Do you consider that good recruiting?

  23. Wolfy__79 05/17/2011 at 8:37 PM #

    2001 WOW. i love all those guys.. i’d like to have seen them accomplish the same things that were in the 70’s!.. must have been coaching or something? 😉

  24. choppack1 05/17/2011 at 10:42 PM #

    Collins was the 5th guy, I don’t know if Mike Bell was in that class or the class before it…with Marcus Melvin and Scooter Sherrill.

    2 years before that you had Cliff Crawford, Damien Wilkins and Marshall Williams (another highly rated class).

    It wasn’t like Sendek didn’t recruit PGs – he signed Miller, Crawford, Atsur, Tony Bethel, Mike O’Donnel and had a verbal from Chris Wright…he tried to sign Cory Alexander, Chris Paul and Mustafa Shakur.

    As for needing a PG to succeed – isn’t it somewhat strange that the 5 years we made the tournament, he didn’t have a PG as traditional as Justin Gainey – and I might add – those teams took care of the ball a heck of a lot better too.

    He definitely took some flyers on combo guards – like Dominique Mejia and Trey Guidry…and FWIW, Mejia, Guidry, Mike Bell and Mike O’Donnell all had at least one season where they averaged double figures after they transferred.

    I’m not going to argue that it was great recruiting. I just don’t think that w/ Sendek recruiting, or specifically, recruiting a great PG was the main problem. (Nor was it Lowe’s – Lowe was just much worse at running a program.)

  25. VaWolf82 05/18/2011 at 8:16 AM #

    FWIW, Mejia, Guidry, Mike Bell and Mike O’Donnell all had at least one season where they averaged double figures after they transferred.

    At what level and against what type of competition?

    I’ve always thought of these guys as mid-major players who finally settled in at that level. If losing a mid-major caliber player leaves a big hole in your line-up, then your recruiting really isn’t all that good to begin with.

    I wanted to get back to this comment of yours:

    If you want to look at the talent of a class you’d have to look at their college careers when they transfer or even their nba careers.

    Who were you thinking of? (Hopefully not those four from above.) Other than Wilkens (who might have been before the 10 year slice of data), I can’t think of a transfer who made an impact at a major program.

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