Projecting the 2010 Draft Class: The Senior Prospects Metric

It can't be stopped. It can't be reasoned with. It barges into serious discussion like a drunk barging into a church picnic. The new 2010 Senior Prospects Metric (SPM) calculations are ready for the 2010 WNBA Draft!

The point of the SPM is to project future WNBA performance based on a player's junior year in college. Granted, a lot can happen between August 2009 and June 2010, but with that in mind, the SPM suggests players to keep your eyes on during the offseason.

Without going into the gory details, here's how the numbers are calcuated.

* The SPM is strongly based on a player's rebounding, shot blocking and stealing.
* Players who can shoot the 3-pointer get credit in the SPM. A guard might not be able to block shots, but she can (or should) be able to shoot the 3-pointer.
* An efficiency rating is created based on adjusted Wins Score per minute.
* The SPM doesn't like players who turn over the ball. The metric is subtractive instead of the traditional assist/turnover ratio.
* Players are penalized if they are older than the average player. Those players are probably better because they're further along in their physical development.
* The SPM loves players who can get 50 steals and 50 blocks in a season. Out of the 127 players studied, only two made that cut - Jessica Breland of North Carolina and Vivian Frieson of Gonzaga.
* The relative strength of a player's conference is taken into account.
* The SPM doesn't like players that are too short. Usually, those players get eaten alive in the WNBA.
* The SPM looks with a jaundiced eye at any player who is 6'6" or more. Generally, those players don't turn out to be that great.
* In addition to 3-point accuracy, guards should make a mininum number of 3-pointers.
* A player should rebound well for her position.
* The SPM gives bonuses to high-usage players - players that eat up a lot of their team's possessions - clearly, those players are generating a lot of their team's offense and beyond a certain point, it impacts their offensive efficiency because opposing teams are keying those defenses on those players. Likewise, low usage players are penalized.
* The Brittany Pittman Rule. This is an option rule, and stats will be presented with and without the rule. Brittany Pittman has the highest rank in the SPM, but she's a little known player from Morehead State. The rule: "Any player who is not from a major conference - the ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 10 or SEC - will have their score docked by half." In general, players from "mid-major" conferences are ignored at the WNBA Draft.

We take all of these stats from these 127 players and throw them into a blender. Everyone gets assigned a number by the SPM which indicates - or rather, should indicate - their potential.

First, let's look at the rankings without the Brittany Pittman Rule. (We expect Brittany Pittman to rise to the top.)





And now, we look at the stats with the Brittany Pittman Rule in effect.





So it seems that according to the SPM, neither Jayne Appel nor Tina Charles is the best player around even if we apply the Brittany Pittman Rule. That honor goes to Jessica Breland, a forward out of North Carolina. Appel comes in third behind Danielle Wilson, a center out of Baylor. Epipphany Prince, who will skip her senior year of college finishes eighth.

Tina Charles ends up in 12th place. Why? Not as many steals or blocked shots per game as some of the other contenders. She's a good player, and the SPM is just a number.

Some odd names appearing in the top 20: Brittany Pittman of Morehead State still stays in the Top 10 even after being docked for playing in the Ohio Valley Conference. Courtnay Pilypaitis of Vermont should be worth a look. There are other players from non-major conferences in the top 20 as well.

Which leads me to another conclusion. The 2010 Draft will not be as strong as drafts of the previous years. Comparing my values to the values of the 2008 class and the 2009 class, the values drop more quickly. There just aren't that many impact players coming out of the 2010 Draft.

This is good news for teams that do well in the 2009 season, and bad news for the lottery finishers. It is less likely that the acquisition of one player is going to turn a team around. There is no Candace Parker-like figure in this draft, or even an Angel McCoughtry-like figure. In any case, the 2009-10 off season will be interesting to watch. A lot of players are clumped together...so which ones will break out of the pack?

Update: pilight's comment forced me to look up some information about Jessica Breland. As it turns out, she has Hodgkin's lymphoma and will be undergoing chemotherapy and will probably miss the 2009-10 season. However, Hodgkin's lymphoma is one of the most curable forms of cancer.

The Best College Player You Never Heard Of?

The one in blue, not the one in red.

I've been working on my new Senior Prospects Metric (SPM), which is basically a convoluted math formula designed to put a value on a senior prospect for the WNBA draft. The point is to take someone's junior year college statistics and project what kind of a player they'll be.

In 2008, it was Candace Parker who got the highest value from the SPM. In 2009, it was Courtney Paris. (Angel McCoughtry was #5.) In 2010 it's...

...Brittany Pittman of Morehead State? Who the hell is that?

Morehead State University is a school located in Morehead, KY. It plays in the Ohio Valley Conference, one of the weakest conferences around.

Right now, the web site for the Eagles is in transition - a sign of moving up? The roster website doesn't work on all browsers - it wasn't functional but work. So let's talk a little about Brittany Pittman:

* She shoots .496 from the field. Okay. But there are lots of players who shoot better.
* She averages 11.9 points a game. Okay.
* She has a nice rebounding rate of 292 rebounds over 29 games, with 111 of those being offensive rebounds. She's probably a forward or center, then.
* She has 41 steals. That's great for a forward or a center. Having 50 blocks and 50 steals in a season is usually a sure-fire sign of NBA success; it might be the same for the WNBA.
* She has 164 blocked shots.

What? What was that number again? 164 blocked shots? It turns out that Pittman leads the country in blocked shots. And she's only a 6'3" center. Egad. Either the competition is very weak indeed in OVC, or Pittman has something going for her.

Look at her blocks per game over the 2008-09 season. You'd think we were reading about Britney Griner instead of Brittany Pittman.

So what do we know about Brittany Pittman? She played at Middle Tennessee State briefly, sat out a year, and then started up at Morehead State. We do know that she was born in December 1986, which makes her a full year older and then some from most of the 2010 WNBA Draft Prospects, so her stats reflect those of a more mature player. However, the SPM accounts for age and even with the formula docking points for age, Pittman still comes out on top of the #2 player, Jessica Breland of North Carolina.

Her old bio is still up at MTSU. Her high school accomplishments, although nice, don't imply that she was ever all-anything. "Voted All-Region three times...Played on the Kentucky All-Stars in 2005...five year letter winner at Tates Creek High School...." Nothing like "#1 Prospect on Scout.com" or "Parade All-American".

According to Morehead State's own newspaper, she doesn't even get credit from her own coach. "In a recent interview, other than a brief acknowledgment of Pittman's skill for blocking shots, (Coach Mike) Bradbury negated everything she has done." (Although in another article her coach says very good things about her.)

So why is the SPM so high on Brittany Pittman?

The SPM believes that there are three skills you should have: the ability to block shots, to rebound, and to steal the ball. For those most part, those are defensive skills. If the SPM were a person, she would probably say, "Pet, I don't think you can teach defense. All of those factors take the ball out of the enemy's hands and put the ball in your team's hands."

Okay, so she can block. So could Marlies Gipson. Yeah, true that, but the SPM put Marlies Gipson at #39, which is pretty close to where she was drafted - i.e., she wasn't drafted at all. The SPM says Pittman has more dimensions than Gipson.

Obviously, the SPM only looks at stats, and not the player. Someone with real knowledge can take a look at Pittman in person and see if she's any good or not. But this begs the question: "How weak is the Ohio Valley Conference?"

One argument against Pittman's high score could be that she fattened that block record against chumps, the same way Mickey in Rocky III blew up Balboa's record by having him fight nobodies. (Then he met Clubber Lang.) The only name opponent that Morehead State played in the 2008-09 season was Louisville, then ranked #13. Like Clubber Lang in Rocky III, Louisville administed a 66-38 beatdown of the Eagles.

She still blocked eight shots, though. And she had seven rebounds. However, she was held to 1-for-4 shooting in 24 minutes of play, scoring two points. (Angel McCoughtry, however, scored 17 points and 12 rebounds.)

But can you really blame that loss on Brittany Pittman, goes the counter-argument? Chynna Bozeman went 1-for-14 in shooting, and that could have been what killed Morehead State. Tiffanie Stephens went 1-for-9 off the bench. For all we know, Louisville's entire strategy might have been "make sure Pittman doesn't have a good game". The problem wasn't that Brittany Pittman wasn't shooting, the problem was that her supporting cast is terrible compared to that of a Big East contender. Part of the problem of being a great player on a team from a weak conference is that by defintion the people around you aren't contenders, and this is why your team either never goes to the post season or loses to the Connecticuts and Stanfords of the world in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

If you look at the 2009 WNBA Draft, there is a real prejudice towards the major conferences: The Big East, Big 10 and Pac 10, ACC, SEC and Big 12. There were 39 positions in the 2009 WNBA draft.

First round: 12 of 13 players from major conferences.
Second round: 10 of 13 players from major conferences. Two foreign players.
Third round: 9 of 13 players from major conferences. One foreign player.

In short, of the 36 players from the United States, 31 of those were from BCS conferences. The ones that weren't.

Quanitra Hollingsworth (Virginia Commonwealth): 1st round - playing for Minnesota
Megan Frazee (Liberty): 2nd round - playing for San Antonio
Josephine Owino (Union): 3rd round - cut
Jessica Adair (George Washington): 3rd round - cut
Britney Jordan (Texas A&M Commerce): 3rd round - cut

Verily, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a player from the mid-majors (or lower) to get a look in the WNBA. I'm wondering if I should use the SPM to dock several points from a player for not belonging to a BCS conference. However, I feel that that would be unjust - the metric shouldn't reflect prejudices of WNBA GMs.

And this is what pisses me off the most about the case of Brittany Pittman. It's not that she might not be good enough to be in the WNBA - hell, there are lots of players who, if a trained eye takes a look, just clearly don't have what it takes. What pisses me off is the thought that people will assume she's bad automatically because she's from a small school and not bother to look at all. The WNBA can't afford to overlook talent, even if it might possibly come from Morehead State University, a school with all of 9,000 students.

P. S.: I hope to have the complete values of the SPM out by tomorrow.