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
From the beginning days of the NBA, the Center position has been one of the most important positions for General Managers to fill on an NBA roster, however, very few teams have elite Centers on their rosters nowadays. Many NBA teams have shifted the focus of their offensive strategies, electing to assemble rosters with more flex-forwards – 6’8” to 7’0” players who can guard taller opposing players, but who do not possess elite low-post skills – and fewer Centers. Is this apparent predicament a supply-based problem, indicating that it’s hard to find talented centers nowadays? Or is it a demand-based problem, indicating that NBA teams have philosophically altered their strategies and no longer place a focus on acquiring/developing Centers?
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, considering 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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