NC State Basketball: Ballparking Freshman Expectations

A couple years back, Luke Winn looked into the performance of top 100 recruits during their first year of college basketball.

Using the RSCI (the Recruiting Services Consensus Index, an aggregator of class rankings), I built a database of the top 100 recruits from the classes of 2006, 2007 and 2008, recording their ranking alongside their freshman-year statistics in a number of categories, the most telling being percent of overall minutes played, percent of possessions used while on the floor (to gauge the significance of their offensive role), and Offensive Efficiency Rating (to gauge how many points they'd score per 100 possessions used).

It's not putting a fine point on things, but as far as establishing a baseline of expectations for incoming players, it's as good a place to start as any. So let's take a look at what this suggests for NC State's incoming trio.

There are a bunch of factors that are going to affect these numbers one way or the other, of course, but this isn't really about the specific figures. The averages say that guys ranked in the Purvis-Warren range come in and usually adjust well to college while also accounting for an above average workload in the offense. In other words, they're college ready. Guys down in the Lewis range tend to be secondary contributors at the outset, and their adjustment is not as easy. Which isn't exactly stunning since, you know, they're ranked lower and on the whole scouts evaluate prospects pretty well. That's as far as I'd go with takeaways from this.

After the jump, how the members of the class of 2011 top 100 who came to the ACC performed as freshmen.