Explaining the Ranking Process
The New England Recruiting Report will begin to release our updated rankings tomorrow, but before we do let’s first consider what goes into a ranking.
NERR rankings are based on prospects’ potential for the next level. In other words, we’re not ranking the top high school basketball players in New England, but instead, the best college prospects.
The difference between the two levels is often the most misunderstood part of the recruiting process. While high school performances, statistics, and even head-to-head match-ups are important, they have to be taken in context.
What is far more important is how a prospect’s individual tools project to the next level. Those tools encompass a wide variety of factors including size, athleticism, skill, intelligence, toughness, and other intangibles. In order to measure those tools, an evaluator must consider both the setting which they are currently being displayed and be able to project how well they will translate to the college setting.
In order to project how well those tools translate to the college setting, an evaluator must have an intimate understanding of that next level, else they’re really doing nothing more than rating how well certain players are performing in a high school or AAU setting.
At the heart of that evaluation process is the ability to weigh potential vs. production. That ratio is a sliding scale which puts a premium on potential early in a prospects’ career and emphasizes production more and more as prospects get deeper in their careers. Within that context, an evaluator must be able to assess the impact of uncontrolled variables like competition, opportunity, coaching, style of play, and a variety of other factors.
Where potential can play an unusually high role, even late in a prospects career, is when they show early potential for an even higher level. In other words, if a high school prospect has NBA potential, that has to be a major factor in where you rank them.
Ultimately, the evaluation process is an inexact science to say the least. The best evaluators, at the highest levels of their field, make mistakes. The ones that are most serious about their craft, attempt to learn from their mistakes and see if any patterns emerge over the years which can aid the evaluation process.
While there is no such thing as a perfect evaluator, there are undeniably unqualified ones. Here are a couple of things to look out for:
1. Incapable of being impartial – If an evaluator has a clear conflict of interest, it very difficult to make the type of impartial analysis that leads to being a good evaluator. This is often true of parents, personal friends, and even sometimes coaches.
2. Unwilling of being impartial – Sometimes “rankings” are used as a tool to push specific players or programs. These types of rankings are virtually never recognized by the mass media or college coaching community, but can sometimes fool the general public.
3. Lacking experience and knowledge – In order to assess which players help you win college basketball games, you have to understand what goes into winning college basketball games. That’s a hard perspective to have without first-hand experience. In other words, being a fan of college basketball isn’t enough and sometimes, having played college basketball isn’t even enough. Instead, those who have coached at that level have an obvious advantage, not just because of their professional experience, but because they have had their livelihood depend on their ability to evaluate, recruit, strategize, and ultimately, win college basketball games.
The New England Recruiting Report doesn’t claim to be the foremost authority on rankings. However, what we do guarantee is that we are impartial, qualified, and willing to do the work necessary to see all of the top prospects that our region has to offer. When we make mistakes, we attempt to learn from them – hence our rankings revisited stories from last winter.
Similarly, we’re willing to put our name on our work. The New England Recruiting Report is run by Adam Finkelstein, who has experience coaching at the both the division I and division III levels, spent three years working under the NBA’s director of scouting Marty Blake, and is currently the northeast recruiting coordinator for ESPN.com. Furthermore, no NERR writer or contributor has any affiliation with any AAU or travel program and consequently no obvious conflicts of interest.
Instead, for the last seven years it has been our goal to promote New England basketball as a whole, drawing attention to a steep tradition of great programs, players, and coaches that exist at the high school, prep school, AAU, and grassroots levels. Rankings are just one more tool to accomplish that goal, hopefully bringing attention, not to the specific order of prospects, but instead to the true depth of talent that exists from top to bottom.