Single Post

Editor’s note: This is the last in a series about men’s college basketball coaches finding success on the margins in recruiting.

Previous: Why birthdays matter | How coaches evaluate beyond the rankings | Work ethic: The most important skill  

Gonzaga was a pesky upstart mid-major that had some juice after an Elite Eight run in 1999. Gonzaga returned its star backcourt the next season, but that didn’t stop coach Dan Monson from leaving for Minnesota. The next year those guards, Richie Frahm and Matt Santangelo, led Gonzaga on another run to the Sweet 16, prolonging the program’s 15 seconds of fame.

But college basketball sees this all the time. No one could blame Monson for bolting. We celebrate the little Jesuit school from the Pacific Northwest. Then poof. It’s someone else’s turn the next year. Saint Peter’s is the latest example. The Peacocks beat Kentucky and Purdue on their way to the Elite Eight this past season. But does anyone expect Saint Peter’s to be relevant in two or three years?

There’s a myriad of reasons why Gonzaga kept rising, but near the top of the list is a suggestion Mark Few made to a 26-year-old assistant coach named Tommy Lloyd, whom he had hired as an administrative assistant in 2000 and then promoted the next year. It’s all about geography.

“I challenged him to develop a niche,” Few says. “And he traveled a lot early on in his life and liked it. So he kind of jumped all over that. And we had already been kind of dabbling in (recruiting overseas), but he kind of grabbed it and really ran with it.”

Most international players, now and then, stay overseas and become professionals. But some dream of coming to the United States, and Gonzaga found a market inefficiency by crossing the pond. Their competition was limited. They could find five-star talents who didn’t have the typical five-star recruitment. French big man Ronny Turiaf was Lloyd’s first big get. Turiaf was an All-West Coast Conference first-team player for his final three seasons at Gonzaga and went 37th in the 2005 NBA Draft. Since then, Gonzaga has had seven foreign-born players drafted in the NBA and several others who have helped turn the school into one of the top programs in America.

“Once you’ve had some success with that, it lends itself to open up more doors and more networking,” Few says. “The players, families, agents, everybody from overseas can see that these guys have had really, really good experiences here, so this would be a good place for you.

“And then, at least what we found early on, is they’re not just ingrained with somewhat of this brainwashing that we have in the US, with ‘Hey we play in this league or this football school,’ or we’re, quote unquote, a blue blood — even though we haven’t done anything the last 30 years. They look at it more just pragmatically like, ‘oh, okay, those guys are really, really good. They win a lot. They’re in the running for national championships and they make pros. I don’t care what their name is. XYZ. That’s all I care about.”

This series was meant to discover which schools have done the best job in the modern era of developing prospects into pros. I wanted to figure out what goes into the development process. But as I started talking to coaches, I became more fascinated by the biographical backgrounds of those who clearly were five-star level prospects but not labeled as such. At the evaluation stage in high school, sometimes there’s an age bias. But is it possible there’s also a location bias?

The easy ones to pick out are some of the best players from overseas. Domantas Sabonis, for instance, is the son of one of the best big men ever, and he ranked 200th in his class. “Come on now,” Few says. “Sabonis is a five-star plus. He’s a six-star!”

It’s hard to blame the evaluators if they never got eyes on a Sabonis. But do they have blind spots in the United States as well? And is a player’s future success tied in any way to where he was born or what conference he played in?

---

A reminder of my process is important before we move on. I started with the Class of 2006, a good starting point since that was the beginning of the one-and-done era. I wanted to only deal with players who truly “made it” to the NBA. So to qualify, a player needed to play at least 82 games in the league, or for those who joined the league in the last few years, they needed to be on pace to get to 82 games. All 2022 draft picks were also included. All five-stars were eliminated from consideration, since five-stars make the NBA at a fairly high rate. (77.2 percent with the five-star designation in the 247Sports Composite from 2006 to 2018 played at least one game in the NBA.) A majority of five-stars also end up at the same programs. In that timespan, Kentucky has had 36 five-stars make it in the NBA; Duke has had 28 and North Carolina has had 18. Those schools have the most NBA players, but again, I wanted to see which schools and coaches are best at developing pros and also spotting potential when it’s not obvious. You can see those results here.

As I pored through the data, one takeaway was that Pac-12 schools performed better than expected. Here are the results broken down by league for the Power 6  conferences, with the second column giving the average number of pros per school:

So why, I wondered, has the Pac-12 hit at a higher rate?

---

Washington is one of the teams that ranked higher than the casual basketball fan would probably expect, producing eight NBA players in the study, tied for fifth-most among all schools. Lorenzo Romar, who played at Washington and coached there for 15 seasons, says he benefitted from Seattle becoming a hot spot for talent. He points to the mid-1990s as a turning point, when George Karl had the SuperSonics rolling. Around that same time, Romar noticed an investment from the city’s leaders into basketball. More playgrounds with basketball courts started popping up, and several of the area’s best high school coaches put an emphasis into developing grassroots programs to give players a chance to play year round.

“The Sonics were fun to watch, and there was this push for basketball,” Romar says.

The other component that Romar believes is unique to the area is that there was a brotherhood amongst the players from the city. The older players who made it would start to mentor the next crop, and so on and so forth — from Donny Marshall to Michael Dickerson to Jason Terry to Jamal Crawford to Brandon Roy to Isaiah Thomas, the latter two of which were the best two players Romar coached at Washington.

“It’s been a cycle of when it’s their turn, they become the mentor,” Romar says. “Dejounte Murray (another former Husky) is one of the mentors now. I’ve never seen anything like it, where they look for the next ones coming up. You’re talking about half a dozen pros that are doing that. And they’re in the trenches with these younger players and just continue to motivate.”

When it comes to number of pros per population, the state of Washington produces more than most areas. In sheer numbers, California is by far the leader in the database, with 45 non-five star NBA players; Texas is next-closest with 21. California is also the home to some of the best players who somehow fell under the radar. Damian Lillard, who’s from Oakland, ranked outside the top 200 in his class and landed at Weber State. Paul George, from the Los Angeles area, wasn’t even ranked and played his college ball at Fresno State. Even Pac-12 schools were unsure about Kawhi Leonard, who ended up at San Diego State.

Romar has always thought the West Coast hoop scene is underrated, and Few believes the bias has simply existed in part because of exposure. “A lot more events, a lot more those kids are probably getting covered more heavily out that direction (on the East Coast) than they are out our direction,” he says.

When it comes to the distribution of five-star status, there could be something to that. These are the five-stars broken down by region from 2006 through 2018:

Now here’s the breakdown of players who made the NBA who weren’t five-stars:

If there’s been an area that’s overproduced based on rankings and population, it’s the Midwest. To control for population, I took the number of non-five star pros per 1 million citizens (using current census data) and then did the same for number of pros (including five-stars through the 2021 class):

While there are hot spots — like Atlanta in the southeast or Dallas and Houston in the South — these numbers suggest it doesn’t really matter where players are from these days, because scouts and coaches will find you.

But similar to international players, it does sometimes take longer for small-town guys to develop. Desmond Bane, for instance, played center for a 1A high school in rural Indiana. He was no-star recruit that TCU saw something in, and four years later he ended up a first-round pick and one of the surprise best rookies in the NBA last year. (He also had a late birthday in June, another reason to buy his potential.)

What’s changed in college basketball, from the days when Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman end up playing NAIA, is grassroots basketball makes it easier to discover the hidden gems. Robert Williams, for instance, is from the small town of Vivian, Louisiana. Williams didn’t play on the grassroots circuit until the the end of his junior year in high school. He’s the prototype of a five-star big man — bouncy and long — but no one really knew who he was before he joined Houston Hoops on the Nike EYBL circuit. By June that year, he had committed to Texas A&M. His performance that summer indicated he was one of the best bigs in his class, but his late arrival to the scene likely kept him ranked slightly lower than had he been born in a bigger city.

“Oftentimes guys who are undervalued or undervalued until late in high school are from just a place where they’re halfway out of the basketball mainstream,” an Eastern Conference assistant general manager says. “Those guys might also have more room to improve because they’ve never faced really good competition before, then you get real coaching, real strength training, real opposition daily and there might be a little more juice there.”

This is something basketball people are becoming wise to when they evaluate. That’s where the basketball community continues to get smarter.

But are there still some geographic biases? One knock west coast guys always got that bothered Romar was they’re soft. You still hear it, even though the game is far less regional than it used to be.

“Cultural stigmas are there for a reason,” Kirk Lacob, assistant GM for the Golden State Warriors, says. “They’re not universally true. But they’re there for a reason. Like tough kids coming from New York. It’s not like someone just made that up. There are definitely some tough kids from New York. It doesn’t mean every kid from New York is tough. Some of them are really soft. But it seems to be a higher number of kids growing up in the city that are. And there definitely seems to be a little more creativity.

“You look at it on the international scene, and for whatever reason, China has had a really hard time producing creative guards, despite having billions and billions of people. Doesn’t mean that there won’t ever be one. I really wouldn’t be surprised if there is one. It’s just for whatever reason they don’t breed them the same way as Americans.”

---

The game is more transient than ever. It’s not just because it’s international either. Grassroots basketball and the presence of teams built to play on the national level — like Montverde Academy or Oak Hill Academy — have many of the best players congregating at the same schools and playing against each other throughout the year. Those teams are also bringing over players from overseas before they get to college.

Where you grow up in the United States is almost as inconsequential as ever before. But the desire to rank players at a young age that puts them on this path also has its consequences.

“I think there’s something when you are pronounced in the so-called silver spoon (category), that’s a lot to deal with,” Virginia coach Tony Bennett says. “And it’s distracting.”

Talent wins, and the success of Kentucky, Duke and North Carolina is proof of that. But it’s telling that the teams that are turning lower-ranked guys into pros, a process that takes place over years, has led to more consistent success. Kansas, Michigan, Gonzaga and Virginia — the top four teams in our study — have appeared in eight national title games, won three and combined for 37 regular-season conference titles during that time. Virginia, which has never landed a five-star under Tony Bennett, has won more ACC regular-season titles (five) than Duke (two) and is tied with UNC since Bennett arrived in Charlottesville in 2009.

Players being willing to be patient is key to that success, which is yet another perk for Few in coaching so many international players.

“I would just say that they’ve been less entitled during the process,” Few says. “You can’t say that across the board, but I would say generally they’re happy as heck to find out you get free shoes and free sweats and stuff like that here. And look, the fact that they’re going to move thousands of miles away from their family and their home language and home culture, all that kind of tells you how motivated they are and just how open they are to change and learning — a different language and everything.”

“A lot of times they’re not spoiled,” Kansas coach Bill Self says. “Their attitude is just tell me what to do, Coach, and I’ll do it. I just want to be good.”

NBA teams seem to be slower to write these prospects off as well if they start slow.

“I think it’s important to know what a guy’s background is to understand why he might succeed early in college or not,” Lacob says. “And so for international guys, sometimes it matters, like kids from small towns or (those) moving across the country, it affects them for a little while. And with international guys, it’s a whole different beast. Some kids who are from specific countries, it translates well, but there’s some where it takes them time to figure things out.”

The best example at Gonzaga is Canadian Kelly Olynyk, who was a bottom-of-the-rotation player his first two seasons in Spokane, and then was convinced to redshirt his junior year. The next season he was a first-team All-American and went in the lottery of the 2013 NBA Draft.

Gonzaga has won in other ways as well. Few hasn’t just relied on the international pipeline. He was ahead of the curve in bringing in transfers, and he’s landed many of the best players in the Northwest. Like Pac-12 schools, Gonzaga has benefitted from the fact that are fewer D-1 schools out West, and thus, less competition.

There’s more competition for international players than when Lloyd first started going overseas — for one, Gonzaga now has to deal with Lloyd as a competitor at Arizona — but it’s still an area where Gonzaga has an edge and will keep taking chances.

“We’ve had good ones, and we’ve had not so good ones too,” Few says. “It’s just like anything. You don’t always hit. You’re hoping to hit 50 percent, and if you do that, you’re doing pretty good.”

(Top photo of Damian Lillard at Weber State: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP)