Calipari’s Kentucky Combine & Analytics Hire: NBA Draft Value?
By Ed Isaacson
Over the past couple of weeks, Kentucky head coach John Calipari has unveiled plans for some new wrinkles added for his Wildcats’ team this season. First, it was reported that Calipari was going to hold a pre-season scouting combine, on the Kentucky campus, for NBA executives and scouts to attend. Then, a few days ago, it was announced that a new member was added to his coaching staff – an analytics expert.
Both moves have been widely praised, and rightly so, as they are great innovations for any college basketball program. However, it’s the reasons behind them being discussed that make little sense to me.
The on-campus scouting combine, which is being referred to as just a “practice”, is scheduled to take place on October 11th and 12th. All thirty NBA teams are expected to attend and ESPN will be televising a portion of it. According to Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Calipari has reached out to NBA teams to help design the format of the combine.
With nine or ten players who are legitimate NBA prospects, this seems like a great opportunity for both the players and the NBA teams in attendance. Is it really a true benefit to either though?
At its heart, the combine really is just a pre-season practice, no matter how tailored it is to NBA tastes. The actual value of what NBA teams can gather on players from this is very low, just like any pre-season practice at any other school in the country. At best, it can give NBA personnel a look at how the many young Kentucky players handle the situation, as well as giving a baseline from which to make judgments later in the year. The real benefit is to Calipari, who can get some trusted outside opinions on his players.
Wojnarowski’s article mentions that after these two days, Calipari will close off Kentucky practices for an unknown amount of time to NBA personnel, giving the players time to focus on the season. This can be an incredibly smart move. With the amount of NBA prospects at Kentucky, NBA teams will want to make trips there often, and for some players, it can be a distraction. Still, this also needs to be handled correctly by Calipari, because NBA teams will want to see how the players progress.
Earlier this week, Calipari announced that Joel Justus, a former assistant coach at Elon, was hired to be the Director of Men’s Basketball Analytics. The basketball world has seen an explosion of analytics’ study and use over the past decade, and the hire seems like Kentucky doing what any top team should do by staying near the front of the pack. Again, it’s the reasoning to me which seems a bit off.
In an article from the Louisville Courier-Journal, Calipari discussed the analytics hire to a Kentucky alumni association group on Monday. When discussing the analytics position, Calipari said referring to his team’s depth, “If you’re playing 20 minutes, what will your NBA stats look like? Terrible for NCAA stats, so we’re going to have big data stats, per-minute, and efficiency stats that we can send to NBA teams.”
While that’s a noble gesture on Calipari’s part, NBA teams will already have access to this data, unless Justus comes up with some new formula specific to Kentucky players. Also, I don’t know of any NBA scout who doesn’t realize Kentucky’s depth and knows that guys may not be playing thirty-plus minutes per game. In the end, when it comes draft times, the numbers will end up being just a small part of a larger puzzle anyway.
Calipari using the numbers internally should make his team better if he uses them correctly (and there’s no reason to assume he won’t.) But to make this an NBA-thing is just window dressing, and an attempt to make Kentucky stand out from the crowd.
The combine and the analytics can both be very good things for Kentucky if used correctly, but as of now, they are ways to build the Kentucky, and Calipari’s, brand. It’s part of what has made Calipari so successful in recruiting. But, in terms of their actual value to NBA teams, which seems to have been highlighted, there’s probably not much. As on executive was quoted in Wojnarowski’s article was quoted about the combine, “We’re just there as B-roll for his recruiting videos.”