The NBA Quality of the NCAA Over Time

Unlike many die-hard NBA fans I’m also a fan of college basketball. I have always tried to sift through the aspects of the college game that make it seem unpalatable to some[1. rigidity of offensive and defensive systems, coach as absolute ruler, pace and outdated rules to name a few.] to find value and entertainment in things such as player skill development, maturation and placing young basketball players in high pressure situations where they are able to either rise to the top or find out something about themselves that they need to work on. It’s not better than the NBA game. It’s different and it exists in a world where the ultimate goal for those playing in college is to get to the NBA.

The NBA is the best basketball league in the world. There’s no doubting that. Of course, each fall, college basketball boosters will decry the big contracts and oversized personalities of the NBA and champion the college game for its “purity”[2. Those who know anything about the NCAA will recognize why purity is in quotations.] and drama. But since the implementation of the 19-year old age limit by the NBA following the 2005 NBA Draft, the quality of the college game has suffered greatly. A game that relies so much on continuity for team success now has started to focus to one-year hired guns, with players eschewing long-term development for the chance at one season of college glory before moving on to pay day at the next level, “ready” or not.

I am, what I would like to call, a situational advocate for college basketball. I like it for what it is, but understand its limitations and faults, not mistaking drama for quality of basketball. The reality is that very little of what is seen on the college basketball court is “NBA quality”. The sheer size and scope of the Division I-A level (351 schools in 2014-2015) waters down the competition level and often makes it hard for the casual fan to decipher which players could translate to the NBA level. Very little of what is seen on the college court actually carries over, and that carryover has dropped over time.

To demonstrate this decline, I looked back at each player taken in the NBA Draft from 1992-2011[3. Data from the 2012-2015 NBA Drafts is readily available as well, but are not particularly useful in this study because they have not yet achieved a significant enough body of work in the league.], their years of college play and subsequent career in the NBA and found three distinct areas which prove the point.

• The declining number of college season played by drafted players.
• The declining percentage of college players in a given year that go on to get drafted/
• The small number of players in college at any one time that go on to become “meaningful” NBA players

Number of Years in College

When Kevin Garnett in 1995 and Kobe Bryant in 1996 set the wheels in motion for high school players to declare for the NBA Draft the average years spent in college by players drafted by NBA teams started to drop and has continued to do so.

The above chart shows two different lines with two very different data sets. The blue line consists of any player that played college basketball in a given season (on the x-axis) that was eventually drafted. For example, Steve Nash was drafted in 1996 after his senior season, but played in each of the three previous seasons as well. Therefore his number of seasons (4) is included in the average of all 4 seasons from 1993-1996. The reason for using the data this way is to get a snapshot of the NBA talent and experience of players in any given season. The drop in college experience of the average draftee is evident. In 1992, the average was 3.89 seasons. That number dropped to 3.32 seasons in 2011, a 17.1% decrease over 20 years.

Players that entered the draft via high school or via foreign leagues and countries are not included in these figures, but are a reason for part of the decline. When teams became more willing to take risks on underdeveloped, but talented high school and foreign players, it pushed out a lot of 3-4 year college players that previously would have been selected, especially those at the back end of drafts. The reward began to outweigh the risk on players that had yet to reach their potential over players that had accumulated 3-4 years of high level college experience.

Looking solely at lottery picks, the decline is even more pronounced. The orange line only in the above chart counts the number of seasons played by lottery picks in that given year and can be viewed along with the more detailed table below[4. Here I have included the 2012-2015 Drafts in the table, but not the chart, because I am only looking at the numbers of seasons of players when they declared for the NBA.]:

The players who end up as lottery picks tend to be so talented they easier for scouts to analyze and project to the NBA level. They also possess more skills earlier in their basketball lives and are simply just better at basketball than their peers, facilitating early jumps to the NBA. Players taken at the beginning of the NBA Draft around 1992 built up impressive college resumes because essentially, the didn’t know any better. For as long as the NBA had been around, with the possible exception of someone like Moses Malone, staying 3-4 years in college was commonplace and the best route to advance to the next level. In 1992, all 11 lottery picks were either juniors or seniors in college, including Shaquille O’Neal (JR), Alonzo Mourning (SR) and Christian Laettner (SR). In today’s NBA, it would be far-fetched to think any of those players would make it to their sophomore year in college.

It wasn’t until players fully realized the risk in returning to school and sacrificing draft position that they started consistently leaving earlier. Take former Arkansas forward Corliss Williamson. Following the 1994 NCAA Championship season by his Razorbacks, he decided to return for his junior season, in lieu of declaring for the draft even though he could have been taken as high as #4 (behind Glenn Robinson, Jason Kidd and Grant Hill). He was eventually taken at the end of the 1995 Lottery (#13 by Sacramento) and had a decent NBA career, but going back to school cost him significant money.

Over the course of the last 20 years, players with the ability or promise to advance to the next level tend do so as soon as possible. Beginning with the aforementioned 1992 class which averaged 3.82 college seasons, the number of seasons began to decline each season with a few fluctuations. There was a temporary uptick in 2006, the first year after high school students were prevented from declaring for the draft without a year in college, but that soon stopped when players like Greg Oden and Kevin Durant in 2007 and Derrick Rose, Michael Beasley, O.J. Mayo and Kevin Love in 2008 began the “one-and-done” trend. The average number of seasons in college for lottery picks has not been above 3 since 1998 and from 2007-2015 the average has been 1.94. 46 of the 63 freshman that have been selected in the lottery since 1992 have been taken since 2007[5. By elaborating on this data, I am not in any way saying that players leaving for the NBA earlier is wrong. I think it is well within each player’s right as long as the current rules are in place for these players to maximize their earning ability. It simply is hurting the quality of play at the college level due to the brief stays of the top players.].

Likelihood of Any Given College Player Making the NBA

Another way of examining the quality of play in college is the percentage of players participating at the college level become NBA draft picks. To look into this, I assumed each college basketball team has 5 starters and 12 players on their roster. Obviously, as the number of teams have increased in Division I-A basketball since 1992, from 298 to 351, the number of players for this calculation have increased. Adding college teams with a fairly constant number of NBA Draft slots means the percentage will automatically go down. In addition, those teams that have entered the Division I-A ranks are also of the lower-tier variety thus making it less likely that their players will be selected. Therefore, I chose to hold constant the number of teams at 298, the number of starters at 1,490 and the number of players at 3,576 to paint a clearer picture of the situation.

In 1992, 12.82% of college starters and 5.34% of all players in Division I-A would go on to get drafted by an NBA team. Whether they played in the NBA or not is irrelevant in this part of the research. The numbers dropped to a low of 7.45% and 3.10% in 2003 during the height of players skipping college altogether, but even when holding the number of teams constant and taking into account the elimination of the high school players’ path to the NBA, those numbers have continued to remain low. In 2011, the percentage of players in college getting drafted by the NBA was down to 8.93% for starters and 3.72% for all players. Given these figures, two things are clear. Even in the early 90’s, very few college players went on to the NBA and that number has dropped limiting the quality of players at the college level today.

Win Shares by Season

In the previous section, I looked at the number of college players that make the NBA, but what portion of them have an impact once they get there? For sake of discussion, I defined a meaningful career in context of both seasons played[3. using 82-game equivalent by calculating total games played divided by 82.] and win shares/season[6. via Basketball-Reference.com.]. A player that played at least 2.5 seasons and averaged at least 3 win shares per season would qualify as a “meaningful” NBA player.[6. This is an imperfect method of determining a player’s impact in the NBA, especially considering win shares are somewhat reliant on team success, but it is quick, simple, and good enough for a quick pass in this scenario.]

The chart above shows three types of drafted NBA players as a percentage of all NCAA starters (again holding 291 college teams constant) eventually drafted in a given college basketball season:

Meaningful = At least 2.5 seasons OR 205 games + 3 win shares/season

<1 Season = A player that appeared in 82 NBA games or less

Other = all drafted players that don’t fit in the above two categories

During the 1992 college basketball season, only 12.82% of Division I-A starters were eventually drafted into the NBA and only 61 of those players, or 4.1%, became meaningful. That number continued to decline through the 90’s as players left early for the draft. Not only were there fewer future NBA draft picks playing in college at any given time, but fewer became meaningful NBA players. The more startling piece of information is that from 1992-2003, there were more players in a given season that saw less than 1 season of NBA action than those players that actually had a measurable impact in the league. The 2008 college season, at 3%, had the highest percentage of meaningful impact players since the 1996 season, but for a majority of the years in the 00’s, the percentage has hovered around 2.5%. The number has continued to decline, but again, 2010 and 2011 still may have players that become “meaningful”.

Conclusion

By looking at the quality of players in the NCAA game through the number of years they stay in college, the percentage of all players and starters that get drafted into the NBA, and finally the number of players that actually become meaningful NBA players, it is clear that very little of what is seen in the college game actually qualifies as high level basketball. Even before the implementation of the “one-and-done” rule, college players were leaving earlier for the draft to capitalize on their ultimate money-making opportunity, stunting player development in some cases and limiting the continuity in the college game. Also, the increasing willingness of NBA front offices to reach into the foreign markets limits the number of draft slots available for college players.

Just remember this college season, don’t let the drama cloud your judgement as to what constitutes high-level basketball and NBA potential. By the percentages, those “meaningful” NBA players are few and far between. Unless you’re Kentucky.