Well, needed a bit of good news (for Basketball) before Football starts. Congratulations to CMW and Staff! Dang AKA must really be "off the boards" for this news. Come back brother, we miss YOU!
Keyontae was actually a 3* recruit in some services! Of course if you re-rated after his soph year he surely would have been a top 25 prospect. He turned into an impactful player. Obviously "impactful recruit" is kind of a meaningless term because sometimes players under or over perform their ranking, or in the case of Tre take a year to live up to their ranking. Lewis really never quite got there. But as meaningless as it is, when people talk about "impact recruit" they usually mean the rating and that the player could have gone anywhere.
Yep. Internet wags often put way too much emphasis on high school player rankings. A look at the NBA will reveal tons of players who weren't highly recruited or ranked. A look at chicken-and-pig dirt courts in 3rd-world countries will turn up lots of former 5-star high school players. I'm more interested in field goal percentage, 3-point percentage, and free-throw percentage than the number of stars some 38-year-old "content provider" living in his mom's basement attaches to a player's name.
You would think top 10 recruits would be “impact recruits” 100% of the time, and really they can’t even get that right. Granted, these type of recruits are still probably mathematically far more likely to succeed as a high level college starter with 1 or 2 years. Some of them do have glaring faults in their game, so it’s kind of fascinating how scouts miss that. To me to be top 10 you shouldn’t have question marks. A guard rated that high better be an elite shooter AND one of the best athletes. Casey Hill was a nice player that had a solid college career, but how the hell did nobody know he couldn’t shoot? Hill is far from the biggest recruiting miss (he made an impact as a freshmen and had a nice career), but he’s sort of the classic example of a guy the recruiting services over-hyped because they saw his elite speed and handles but missed the faults in his game. Stats matter.
Former 5-star Kasey (With a K) Hill was a good college player, very athletic, an excellent defender, and a good Gator and teammate. But his shooting woes he never could overcome, and kept him out of the NBA. Then you see guys like former 3-star Stephen (Get Me the Ball and Get Out of My Way) Curry, and you say, "Wow, that guy's phenomenal." Former 2-star Scottie (Don't Waste a Scolly on That Guy) Wilbekin became SECPOY and took us to a Final Four. There's more to basketball brilliance than online high school rankings posted by guys that are just circulating what other guys have already claimed to be the truth.
As I noted in SG, the false precision on these rankings is hilarious. 247 has the #2 bball recruit as "0.9994". Reeeeeaaaaalllly.....he's within 0.06% of #1? Did you use a scanning electron microscope to reach that conclusion? #10 is "0.9966". So 0.34% from #1. What is this, gymnastics scoring? I bet the margin of error is over 2% which gets you outside the Top 50.
Yes stats matter...as do ability and "want to". The problem is for some of these guys high school ball is so easy to dominate that you don't know what they're going to do when faced with competition from similar talent and/or face adversity, as BD used to like to say. Intangibles like worth ethic, attitude and discipline are just as important, but often overlooked and forgotten vs physical attributes
clearly 247 sports employs some of the world's best mathematicians and statisticians to get it down to 4 decimal places
