boutons_deux
03-16-2010, 05:08 AM
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March 15, 2010
How the Midmajors Reel in Those Stars
By PETE THAMEL (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/pete_thamel/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Dave Telep evaluates high school basketball players for a living. While most fans watch the N.C.A.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_collegiate_athletic_assn/index.html?inline=nyt-org) tournament to root for their alma mater or to follow their brackets, Telep sees a referendum on his professional opinion.
Too many times, Telep said, he will see a player like Patrick O’Bryant, a 7-footer who led Bradley on an unexpected run to the Round of 16 in 2006, and torture himself for not having identified him as a high-caliber prospect.
So Telep, the national recruiting director of Scout.com (http://scout.com/), decided last summer to execute a semi-scientific evaluation. Call it a study of Cinderella’s DNA: what makes up a great midmajor player and why those players were not recruited by traditional powers.
“You can only do my job for so long before you flip on the N.C.A.A. tournament, look at the guy from Bradley, shake your head and wonder, ‘How did that happen?’ ” Telep said. “The whole goal of this study was to lessen my angst during the N.C.A.A. tournament.”
Telep spends his summer canvassing the country watching games from Las Vegas to Orlando, with many Marriotts and airports in between. So he had his summer intern, a Duke (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/duke_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) sophomore named Drew Cannon, dig up background information on 32 players who made first-team all-league in conferences like the Atlantic 10, the Colonial Athletic Association and the Missouri Valley.
From Davidson’s Stephen Curry to Xavier’s B. J. Raymond to Old Dominion’s Gerald Lee, the study analyzed the players and why they were overlooked. Some results were obvious.
“Not every small forward is going to look like Wesley Johnson and not every power forward is going to look like Markieff Morris,” Telep said of the Syracuse and Kansas stars.
Some were not as obvious. Working in his parents’ basement, next to his brother who was playing video games on an Xbox 360, Cannon spent the summer making about 100 phone calls to high school coaches to ask them a standard sample set of questions about the players, everything from their academics to their competitiveness to whether they were introverted or extroverted.
Cannon then broke the 32 players into nine categories: high-major talent, fortunate foreign find, hidden gem, skinny ultraquick shooting guard, skinny/slow shooter, skinny/skilled big man, undersize power forward, late-arriving big man and intangibles freak.
“It makes sense as to why some kids make it at our level,” Bradley Coach Jim Les said of the study. “You always say, ‘Well, how come so-and-so didn’t recruit so-and-so?’ There’s some very clear reasons.”
Cannon is a statistics major at Duke and hopes to apply that degree in the basketball world some day. But he said he was not a believer in all things falling into “nice little neat lines.” He was surprised when the study did.
“I was surprised at how consistent the findings were throughout,” he said. “You could look at any guy and say he wasn’t recruited because he was too small or wasn’t fast enough. You could understand where his success came from and how he ended up at a midmajor. There was no one that blew me away.”
Perhaps the most telling analysis in the study comes from how to judge a player’s frame. Midmajor big men are often viewed a tick off by powerhouse programs. Be it too short, too skinny or too weak, there is always something holding them back. Guards may be too short or slow. Forwards may not have the proper size to be considered a power forward or the proper skills to be considered a small forward.
“It appears to me that frame is weighted the same when considering midmajor prospects as it is when considering high major prospects, and this simply shouldn’t be the case,” Cannon concluded in the study. Basically, too many skinny but skilled guys fill in and become stars. Too many short but strong power forwards become productive players.
Cannon goes on to write that midmajor programs should evaluate physical attributes differently.
“It seems that, for guards, size in both directions isn’t correlated with success,” he wrote, with Curry as one of the study’s examples. “For forwards, rather than needing both height and bulk, one or the other is enough if the other skills are there.”
In a telephone interview after this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament field was released, Telep had no problem slotting players into the categories Cannon came up with in the study.
Telep said that a player flourishing at the midmajor level often came from understanding the reality of his game. He pointed to the San Diego State (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/san_diego_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) freshman forward Kawhi Leonard, who leads the Aztecs in scoring at 12.8 points per game. His No. 11 Aztecs will play No. 6 Tennessee in the first round on Thursday.
Telep said that Leonard was a productive player whom he ranked in the top 100 in high school, but that Leonard lacked a true position.
“In football, guys who don’t have a true position they just call athletes,” Telep said. “In basketball, we don’t have that term. Kawhi Leonard didn’t fit neatly into a compartment. So he went to a place where he can develop a fat résumé and has a better chance of maxing out his talent and ability than he would have done sitting at Washington or U.C.L.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and learning the ropes.”
And now that Telep knows some of the reasons he and so many big-time coaches missed on so many players in the past, maybe he can watch this year’s tournament with less angst.
Thayer Evans contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/sports/basketball/16ncaa.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
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March 15, 2010
How the Midmajors Reel in Those Stars
By PETE THAMEL (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/pete_thamel/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Dave Telep evaluates high school basketball players for a living. While most fans watch the N.C.A.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_collegiate_athletic_assn/index.html?inline=nyt-org) tournament to root for their alma mater or to follow their brackets, Telep sees a referendum on his professional opinion.
Too many times, Telep said, he will see a player like Patrick O’Bryant, a 7-footer who led Bradley on an unexpected run to the Round of 16 in 2006, and torture himself for not having identified him as a high-caliber prospect.
So Telep, the national recruiting director of Scout.com (http://scout.com/), decided last summer to execute a semi-scientific evaluation. Call it a study of Cinderella’s DNA: what makes up a great midmajor player and why those players were not recruited by traditional powers.
“You can only do my job for so long before you flip on the N.C.A.A. tournament, look at the guy from Bradley, shake your head and wonder, ‘How did that happen?’ ” Telep said. “The whole goal of this study was to lessen my angst during the N.C.A.A. tournament.”
Telep spends his summer canvassing the country watching games from Las Vegas to Orlando, with many Marriotts and airports in between. So he had his summer intern, a Duke (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/duke_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) sophomore named Drew Cannon, dig up background information on 32 players who made first-team all-league in conferences like the Atlantic 10, the Colonial Athletic Association and the Missouri Valley.
From Davidson’s Stephen Curry to Xavier’s B. J. Raymond to Old Dominion’s Gerald Lee, the study analyzed the players and why they were overlooked. Some results were obvious.
“Not every small forward is going to look like Wesley Johnson and not every power forward is going to look like Markieff Morris,” Telep said of the Syracuse and Kansas stars.
Some were not as obvious. Working in his parents’ basement, next to his brother who was playing video games on an Xbox 360, Cannon spent the summer making about 100 phone calls to high school coaches to ask them a standard sample set of questions about the players, everything from their academics to their competitiveness to whether they were introverted or extroverted.
Cannon then broke the 32 players into nine categories: high-major talent, fortunate foreign find, hidden gem, skinny ultraquick shooting guard, skinny/slow shooter, skinny/skilled big man, undersize power forward, late-arriving big man and intangibles freak.
“It makes sense as to why some kids make it at our level,” Bradley Coach Jim Les said of the study. “You always say, ‘Well, how come so-and-so didn’t recruit so-and-so?’ There’s some very clear reasons.”
Cannon is a statistics major at Duke and hopes to apply that degree in the basketball world some day. But he said he was not a believer in all things falling into “nice little neat lines.” He was surprised when the study did.
“I was surprised at how consistent the findings were throughout,” he said. “You could look at any guy and say he wasn’t recruited because he was too small or wasn’t fast enough. You could understand where his success came from and how he ended up at a midmajor. There was no one that blew me away.”
Perhaps the most telling analysis in the study comes from how to judge a player’s frame. Midmajor big men are often viewed a tick off by powerhouse programs. Be it too short, too skinny or too weak, there is always something holding them back. Guards may be too short or slow. Forwards may not have the proper size to be considered a power forward or the proper skills to be considered a small forward.
“It appears to me that frame is weighted the same when considering midmajor prospects as it is when considering high major prospects, and this simply shouldn’t be the case,” Cannon concluded in the study. Basically, too many skinny but skilled guys fill in and become stars. Too many short but strong power forwards become productive players.
Cannon goes on to write that midmajor programs should evaluate physical attributes differently.
“It seems that, for guards, size in both directions isn’t correlated with success,” he wrote, with Curry as one of the study’s examples. “For forwards, rather than needing both height and bulk, one or the other is enough if the other skills are there.”
In a telephone interview after this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament field was released, Telep had no problem slotting players into the categories Cannon came up with in the study.
Telep said that a player flourishing at the midmajor level often came from understanding the reality of his game. He pointed to the San Diego State (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/san_diego_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) freshman forward Kawhi Leonard, who leads the Aztecs in scoring at 12.8 points per game. His No. 11 Aztecs will play No. 6 Tennessee in the first round on Thursday.
Telep said that Leonard was a productive player whom he ranked in the top 100 in high school, but that Leonard lacked a true position.
“In football, guys who don’t have a true position they just call athletes,” Telep said. “In basketball, we don’t have that term. Kawhi Leonard didn’t fit neatly into a compartment. So he went to a place where he can develop a fat résumé and has a better chance of maxing out his talent and ability than he would have done sitting at Washington or U.C.L.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and learning the ropes.”
And now that Telep knows some of the reasons he and so many big-time coaches missed on so many players in the past, maybe he can watch this year’s tournament with less angst.
Thayer Evans contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/sports/basketball/16ncaa.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
http://up.nytimes.com/?d=0/2/&t=&s=2&ui=2423756&r=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2enytimes%2ecom%2f2010%2f03%2f1 6%2fsports%2fbasketball%2f16ncaa%2ehtml%3fpartner% 3drss%26emc%3drss&u=www%2enytimes%2ecom%2f2010%2f03%2f16%2fsports%2f basketball%2f16ncaa%2ehtml%3fpartner%3drss%26emc%3 drss%26pagewanted%3dprint http://wt.o.nytimes.com/dcsym57yw10000s1s8g0boozt_9t1x/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&WT.js=No&WT.tv=1.0.7
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