With the conclusion of the 2013-14 college basketball season
and the mounting excitement surrounding the 2014 NBA Draft, I decided to compile
and analyze some data from the past 15 NBA Drafts (1999-2013), in an effort to
find out which college basketball programs have churned out the most first
round NBA Draft selections during that time period, as well as to discover trends
connected to when players are selected, based upon their on-court positions
(e.g. center, power forward, etc.).
NBA Draft Feeder
Schools
Below is a data table that shows the college basketball
programs that have placed the highest number of first round selections in the
NBA Draft from 1999 to 2013. The table also provides a segmented snapshot of
when players were selected in the first round (e.g. picks 1-3, 4-6, etc.). According
to the data, Duke, Kentucky, and North Carolina (“UNC”) sit atop the
leaderboard, in terms of the overall number of players selected. Interestingly,
the number of players from Duke or Kentucky that have been drafted with 1 of
the top 6 picks in the past 15 NBA Drafts is much larger than the number of
players from North Carolina who have been selected with a top 6 pick: Duke – 6,
Kentucky – 6, North Carolina – 2.
Position Trends in
the NBA Draft
Data from the past 15 NBA Drafts suggests that the
predicament is more supply-based than demand-based. Of the 450 players selected
in the first round in that 15-year time frame, only 74 (16.4%) were Centers –
the lowest percentage among all positions. This fact does not definitively lead
to the conclusion that the lack of Centers in the NBA is a supply-based
problem, but, consider that of those 74 Centers selected in the first round
since 1999, 38 of them (51.3%) were selected with a top 12 pick, and 10 of them
(13.5%) were selected with a top 3 pick. Both of these percentages are the
highest among all positions when evaluated with the same criteria. Therefore,
Centers are still highly sought after, and, in fact, they are coveted more than
any other position when they are projected to be impact performers for NBA teams.
But the overall supply of Centers who enter the draft and project to be solid
contributors for NBA teams is less than the overall number of prospects at
other positions who also project to be solid contributors (see table below).
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