Predicting the Next Sophomore Sensation

Luke Winn and BasketballProspectus.com, two of the most prolific subjects of the Final Four Blog, have teamed up to give you fans a great new blog post here that’s both pure stats from BP and great, insightful writing by Luke. Today they’re suing stats to figure out which players will be breakout stars this next season. Basically (and Luke explains it really well in the article) there are offensive efficiency stats that determine how many often a player gets involves in a play- either by shooting, rebounding making an assist, etc.- on an average. So if you are a very active offensive player, even if you don’t play a lot of minutes, or get good point totals, you’ll still have a high efficiency rating.

Players who go after it as a freshman are more likely to become high scorers when they are sophomores and they start getting more minutes when other players leave. Not surprisingly, the players that Luke Winn names in his research are mostly from mid-major schools, such as Gonzaga and Creighton, because a lot of the time the big time schools’ best frosh leave after one season. Check out the article. Very interesting read.

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