Illinois Hoops Recruiting Thread
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I think one would find a pretty significant statistical difference between 5 star players and 3 start players, Jeremy and Sky not withstanding Proably need to factor in the fact that 5 star players are far less likely to be around for 4 years helping the program
Factoring out the statistical difference betwee 3 and 4 star players I imagine would be much more difficult.
Player development and coaching are are also difficult variables to assess.
Looking back, what 3 or 4 star players made the most significant developnment during their careers at Illinois, perhaps moving from 3 star to 4 star, and 4 star to 5 star????
I hope so. Let's not forgot Chasson Randle was also a legacy recruit that liked Stanford...Does Alec Busse switch who he writes for every month ?
Also - Stanford offered Phoenix 3 days ago … He does really like Iowa State … Kendall would not be able to live with himself if his kid went to NW over Illinois …
So in conclusion …
RJ seemed lost in the sense that he wasn't the cocky/confident kid who could do no wrong.
i always said i'd rather coach a kid i had to pull back and slow down rather than a kid who i
had to constantly pat on the back and try to convince him of how good he was. the first kid
as a pain in the !!! but if you could corral him, he could do amazing things.
i always said i'd rather coach a kid i had to pull back and slow down rather than a kid who i
had to constantly pat on the back and try to convince him of how good he was. the first kid
as a pain in the !!! but if you could corral him, he could do amazing things.
I think it would be interesting to see the breakdown of wins added over the course of a college career of 5-star vs. 3-star players in the new age of NCAA basketball. It's probably closer than we think. There aren't many 5 stars in any class. The vast majority take a ton of resources to get into the building for a visit. Then you have to convince them to play college ball at all... Then, when you've finally got them, they're gone after 6 months.
Recruiting in the 50-150 range might just be the sweet spot moving forward...
indeed. He dad went to U of I
I think this is some pretty big rationalizing here.
You ALWAYS want the 5 star player. 5 star players are really good. Really good players help you win a lot of games. Winning a lot of games makes you more enticing to the next 5 star recruit. It's really as simple as that.
Just look at Brandon Miller at Alabama. The went from 19 wins to 31 wins in one year. Sure they brought in a lot of new players between those 2 seasons and had the #4 recruiting class in the nation, but look at that recruiting class. 4 star #27 Jaden Bradley was pretty meh, 4 star #43 Rylen Griffen was pretty meh, their #99 player, which for some reason is still listed as 4 stars was much better than those two. But is was Brandon Miller, #14 overall 5 star, that came in and immediately was the team leader averaging 19 and 8. He was the guy opponents worried about and they couldn't stop him.
You want as many of those guys as you can possibly get every single year. I think if you are thinking about transfers while you're recruiting, you're already losing. Sure you need to gauge the player the best you can. You want kids that have a workers mentality, those that can handle adversity, so there is definitely an element of determining if the kid has the right mindset for your team, but I want the best player I can get no matter what. If I bring in a 4 star Fr that is better than my 4 star Soph, play the Fr and if the Soph transfers, I don't care. I'll just bring in another strong player next year.
What transfer have we lost that really disappointed everyone since the portal era began Epps? Skyy? Sounds like in both of those cases it was a personality conflict, not as much basketball related. We have the money to keep the guys that perform. The guys that don't, well good luck somewhere else. We'll use your scholarship to bring in someone else. And we want the best someone else we can find. And yes, while not perfect, the higher rated players do correlate to the highest performing players.
The problem with star rankings is they don’t tell you where the weakness in a players game is.
a player like Zion Williamson who is athletic and big but is not a great shooter he got a high ranking The question becomes does that translate against bigger and faster players. For him it did at the college level but his shot still need me work
Then you have Morant who played high school ball and aau ball with Zion didn’t even make top 300. Minus his legal troubles he has a more complete game than most 5 stars could dream of
Seth Curry is an elite shooter but people questioned his size and athleticism
It seems to me the star ratings undervalue shooting because it can be taught where athleticism and size can’t. I rather have 5 shooters on the floor than 5 athletes who can’t shoot above 30% from three or 75% from the line but there is a balance
a player like Zion Williamson who is athletic and big but is not a great shooter he got a high ranking The question becomes does that translate against bigger and faster players. For him it did at the college level but his shot still need me work
Then you have Morant who played high school ball and aau ball with Zion didn’t even make top 300. Minus his legal troubles he has a more complete game than most 5 stars could dream of
Seth Curry is an elite shooter but people questioned his size and athleticism
It seems to me the star ratings undervalue shooting because it can be taught where athleticism and size can’t. I rather have 5 shooters on the floor than 5 athletes who can’t shoot above 30% from three or 75% from the line but there is a balance
One of those lowly 3 star players - One that got away. 
Jalen Pickett averaged 14 points, 6.3 rebounds, 4.6 assists and 2.1 steals per game. He became academically eligible to play in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).[2] Pickett was considered a three-star recruit by Rivals and received few offers from NCAA Division I programs. He committed to Siena to play for first-year head coach Jamion Christian.
https://onwardstate.com › Topics › Athletics
Mar 30, 2023 — Jalen Pickett keeps bringing in the awards, folks. The fifth-year guard was named a Wooden Award All-American on Thursday evening.
Penn State's Jalen Pickett named AP All-American
PennLive.com
https://www.pennlive.com › 2023/03 › penn-states-jalen-...
Mar 14, 2023 — Penn State's Jalen Pickett was named to the Associated Press All-American second team. It marks the second All-American team the Penn State ...
Jalen Pickett averaged 14 points, 6.3 rebounds, 4.6 assists and 2.1 steals per game. He became academically eligible to play in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).[2] Pickett was considered a three-star recruit by Rivals and received few offers from NCAA Division I programs. He committed to Siena to play for first-year head coach Jamion Christian.
Jalen Pickett Named Wooden Award All-American
Onward Statehttps://onwardstate.com › Topics › Athletics
Mar 30, 2023 — Jalen Pickett keeps bringing in the awards, folks. The fifth-year guard was named a Wooden Award All-American on Thursday evening.
Penn State's Jalen Pickett named AP All-American
PennLive.com
https://www.pennlive.com › 2023/03 › penn-states-jalen-...
Mar 14, 2023 — Penn State's Jalen Pickett was named to the Associated Press All-American second team. It marks the second All-American team the Penn State ...
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The RSCI top 100 is positively correlated with career NBA win shares, draft position, and whether a player will be drafted at all. A 21-30 recruit is twice as likely to be drafted as a 41-50 recruit. The 41-50 recruit is twice as likely to be drafted as the 81-90 recruit. The 11-20 recruit group usually has as many or more players drafted as the 51-90 recruits. It's easy enough to bash the online evaluators as idiots, but the RSCI list that is ultimately put out strongly correlates with the opinion of NBA scouts, more than a year in advance.
My thesis is still the same...you need star players. Either you recruit the consensus 5 star, future NBA caliber player, something like 40 other schools have managed to do this since the 2018 Ayo class. Or you bring in star players through the transfer portal. I don't necessarily dislike the transfer portal route, but anyone who is a bona fide superstar is going to go to the NBA and not transfer here.
Any talk of great scouting and coaching finding diamonds in the rough and building them up sounds like a cross between wishful thinking and Bruce Weber bad memories.
My thesis is still the same...you need star players. Either you recruit the consensus 5 star, future NBA caliber player, something like 40 other schools have managed to do this since the 2018 Ayo class. Or you bring in star players through the transfer portal. I don't necessarily dislike the transfer portal route, but anyone who is a bona fide superstar is going to go to the NBA and not transfer here.
Any talk of great scouting and coaching finding diamonds in the rough and building them up sounds like a cross between wishful thinking and Bruce Weber bad memories.
This whole discussion is a little crazy to me. Of course you want a 5* over a 3* all other things being equal. Now, how often the other things are equal is the question. We can all find examples of 3* that out played their ratings, just as we can find 5* and high 4* that didn’t pan out. A 3* rating or somewhat lower ranking is not the kiss of death. We’ll likely have more than a couple of them on our roster at any one time. BU and staff’s job is to make sure we get the right ones.
Thank you for providing some objectivity
I feel this explanation to be unnecessary as I think everyone understands that on average 5 star recruits are better than 3 star recruits. That's not the argument I'm seeing. The argument I am seeing (and have made myself) is that having 3 of them on your roster isn't some kind of death knell.
Building a roster is more of a knapsack algorithm kind of thing where you put X number of resources into one player and Y number of resources into another player in an effort to optimize the sum of the parts you can afford to acquire (or other factors) and less so much a hungry-hungry hippos thing where you just gobble up the highest ranked recruits from the scouting services and call it a day.
Joel Goodson
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This. And as others have stated, we are taking the 3 stars that we want.
Since we are talking about star rankings...how many 5 star recruits were on the Butler teams that played in back to back National Championship games?
I obviously don't know the answer, but I don't remember a bunch of top rated recruits.
I obviously don't know the answer, but I don't remember a bunch of top rated recruits.
13 out of 15 have at least one 5 star player. 13 out of 15 have at least one 3 star player 14 out 15 have at least four 4 star players
I went to the RSCI 100 page on basketball-reference.com. You can export these into excel and then use the pearson() function to find the exact correlation to parce the data however you want. You might be able to check other things like games started as a freshman vs. the ranking but I didn't try to go any further.
To other's, I'm not arguing against taking 3 star players, but saying that having a superstar is vital, and the top recruits are where the superstar's are most likely to come from.
To use an NFL analogy, ~50% of NFL all pro's are first round draft picks. Just because you get an occasional Tom Brady superstar late in the draft (NFL equivalent of a 3-star recruit) doesn't mean it makes sense to trade your high draft picks for multiple really low picks to increase your odds of your scouts pinpointing the star players.
Thanks, this is a great chart, but it doesn't answer my question.
But we're not trading anything so I don't understand how the analogy makes a lick of sense? We're getting the best talent we can get given the assets we have at our disposal to get them.
Nobody is expecting to find the next Tom Brady in the bottom half of the RSCI. Let's not frame things as if we are choosing Jase Butler over LeBron James.
Additionally, TSJ was acquired via the transfer portal. I think we need to start giving some merit to said transfer portal being a great way to get an influx of talent thats much more predictable and nets you more ready-to-use players than the yearly pool of 17 year old children.
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So there have been zero 5* recruits and a bunch of experience on the last four national champions.
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