This is not a vent board or any other kind of therapy. Before you hit the POST button, ask yourself if your contribution will add to the level of discussion going on.
Important notes on articles:
- Please do not copy entire articles into your post; rather, provide links to them.. We are now links-only for ALL Internet publications. If only a small portion of the article pertains to your post, Fair Use allows you to copy those one or two paragraphs, provided you cite the author's name and the publication for which he writes. Otherwise, put a link in the HTTP Link box.
- Even if you're copying a reference to an article, provide a link to the page from which the article came. We're trying to cut down on duplicate topics, and the posting process will check the link to your article to see if it's already being discussed on this board. At the very least, you'll save yourself some grief on the boards.
- If your first reaction after reading the article you're going to share is the author is uninformed / stupid / a jerk / all of the above, it's not worth sharing with anyone. Not every article needs to be discussed. The more the hair-pulling articles are discussed (e.g. ESPN Page 2), the more the authors will write hair-pulling articles.
Post being replied to
Oh, those ubiquitous ratings! by BabaGhanouj
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 # | Name | Avg.H.S. Rating | Var. from H.S. Rating |
---|
1 | A’ja Wilson | 1.8 | -0.8 |
2 | Kelsey Mitchell | 2.5 | -0.5 |
3 | Diamond DeShields | 2.3 | 0.7 |
4 | Gabby Williams | 10.0 | -6 |
5 | Jordan Canada | 6.4 | -1.4 |
6 | Azura Stevens | 31.4 | -25.4 |
7 | Ariel Atkins | 5.4 | 1.6 |
8 | Victoria Vivians | 43.6 | -35.6 |
9 | Lexie Brown | 15 | -6 |
10 | Kia Nurse | 26 | -16 |
11 | Maria A. Vadeeva | Russian | |
12 | Marie Gulich | German | |
13 | Jaime Nared | 19.8 | -6.8 |
14 | Stephanie Mavunga | 16.0 | -2 |
15 | Monique Billings | 26 | -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.