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Message: [QUOTE="Mike Honcho, post: 5181617, member: 401"] We've talked a ton about relying on our sophomore class this year, but I had it in my mind that most college stars had bigger improvements from year 2 to year 3. After doing some analysis, I found that the data doesn't really support that. Kemba's AA season was his third and final season, and while his PPG increased dramatically (14.6 to 23.5), his shooting splits and rebounds, assists, steals were all pretty similar. Same with Caron... his PPG increased from 17 to 25.1, but everything else was pretty similar (other than blocks, which went from 2.1 to 3.3). Obviously a lot of this is how you break down the data, and percentage increases are always going to overvalue bigger deltas, which are easier when your freshman year stats suck. Here's what I did and didn't do. [LIST=1] [*]I did not normalize the stats per 40 minutes. This probably could have helped address the earlier downside I mentioned about percentage changes. [*]I did not take a player's usage into account. Typically that affects shooting percentages. [*]I did pull a ton of data from our stars over the Calhoun/KO/Hurley years. [LIST] [*]That's 18 players (in chronological order... Donyell, Ray, Khalid, Rip, Caron, Emeka, Ben, Charlie, Rudy, Hasheem, Kemba, Boat, Shabazz, Jalen, Andre, Adama, Jordan, Donovan) [/LIST] [*]I did not pull data for stars who transferred in (e.g. Tristen). [*]I ended up removing the three 2-and-done guys from the analysis (Charlie, Rudy, Jordan, Donovan). That left 14 players. [*]There were only 3 players who stayed the full four years (Boat, Bazz, Jalen), so I'm not presenting the 3->4 year changes. [/LIST] Anyways, the point is less about the data, and more about development expectations, especially given our sophomore class. My judgment after running this analysis is that the expectations are fair -- and that stardom is usually revealed between freshman and sophomore years. Hilton Armstrongs are seemingly pretty rare. [ATTACH type="full"]106631[/ATTACH] Happy to share the data with anyone interested. Hat tip to sports-reference. [/QUOTE]

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