Oh, those ubiquitous ratings!
by BabaGhanouj (2018-06-03 14:25:12)
Edited on 2018-06-03 16:57:48
Post Reply Return to McGraw's Bench

How good are high school ratings in predicting the future success of women basketball players? The tremendous effort and attention by college coaches over the top rated players (to say nothing of fan obsession on college board sites) seems to indicate that the ratings are pretty good indicators of future success, but humans are often notoriously poor in assessing long term probabilities in life. To check if the coaches’ and fans’ love affair with ratings are justified I took the first 15 players drafted in the 2018 WNBA draft and compared the selection number to the HS average rating. This is much too small a sample to draw confident conclusions, but here are the results nonetheless:
(I picked 15 because that’s all I had time for at the moment. Perhaps I’ll do more comparisons in the furure.)


High School Ratings as predictors of the WNBA Draft
2018 WNBA Draft #NameAvg.H.S. RatingVar. from H.S. Rating
1A’ja Wilson1.8-0.8
2Kelsey Mitchell2.5-0.5
3Diamond DeShields2.30.7
4Gabby Williams10.0-6
5Jordan Canada6.4-1.4
6Azura Stevens31.4-25.4
7Ariel Atkins5.41.6
8Victoria Vivians43.6-35.6
9Lexie Brown15-6
10Kia Nurse26-16
11Maria A. VadeevaRussian
12Marie GulichGerman
13Jaime Nared19.8-6.8
14Stephanie Mavunga16.0-2
15Monique Billings26-11


Certainly not perfect correlation from H.S. rating to pro draft, but not a bad measure considering all of the different factors involved.

But then, again, don’t count out someone like Loryn Goodwin. I couldn’t find her on the rating services, but she graduated from high school in 2012. She played for four different colleges: N. Texas, Butler, UTSA (Univ. of Texas at San Antonio), and Oklahoma State. Somehow, she ended up being the 18th player selected in the 2018 WNBA Draft.

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