Sporting Madness

Here's the second part of the 2002 draft comparison I started the other day , looking at the success rates of players in the NBA and NHL drafts. See that post for an explanation of what I'm trying to accomplish and a discussion of some of the limiting factors of this type of analysis. The format is almost the same, but the ratings are tweaked slightly to allow for the differences in each sport; full explanations are below. I've also included the ratings as a column in the actual spreadsheets to make it easier to see how players performed relative to their draft position. I have an analysis of the differences between leagues at the end of the post as well. NBA: [Table from Wikipedia ] System: 5 – All-star (at least one all-star game selection) 4 – Solid (played in 60 or more games last season) 3 – Marginal (played in the NBA last season) 2 – One-off (played at least 100 career NBA games) 1 – Bust (played less than 100 games) Ratings: 5 – Ming, Butler, Stoudemire: three play...

Inspired by a Twitter suggestion from Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus , I figured it would be interesting to compare the washout rate of first-round prospects across the four major North American sports. Carroll suggested 2004 as a year, so I started there, but the baseball evaluation was difficult, as several of those prospects are just beginning to crack the league. Thus, I went back a couple years further to the 2002 draft. It's a nice distance, as prospects' status is usually pretty well set after seven years. This MLB draft also has the added appeal of being featured by Michael Lewis in Moneyball . Here's the first part of the comparison, looking at the MLB and NFL first-round drafts; I'll have the second half, looking at the NBA and NHL, up tomorrow. First, a note on the evaluation system used. I was looking for a simple way to compare prospects across sports, so I went with a five-point scale. Under this system, players ranked as a five are presumed to be a...

Yesterday morning saw Manchester United see off Southampton rather easily [ ESPN Soccernet ] in the third round of the F.A. Cup. They were helped by the sending off of Saints' striker Matt Paterson in the first half and a questionable penalty call, but the class divide between the two teams was still striking. United started two players who have barely seen any first-team action this season( Jonathan Evans and Danny Welback ) as well as several others whose minutes have been limited of late ( John O'Shea , Nani and Gary Neville ), and the Red Devils also brought on rarely-used Darron Gibson and Rodrigo Possebon as substitutes, but these lesser lights still had little trouble with the Saints. It's interesting how quickly things change in soccer. Southampton has a long history of good, if not great proportions; they won the FA Cup in 1976 (reasonably recent by English soccer standards) and they reached Division I for the second time in 1978 and stayed there until 1992, ...

Langley baseball star Brett Lawrie, recently the primary subject of a feature in this space, was picked 16th overall [TSN] by the Milwaukee Brewers in this afternoon's Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft. That's the highest a Canadian position player has ever been taken: the previous record was 27th overall, established by Kevin Nicholson, a shortstop from Surrey, B.C. who went to the San Diego Padres in 1997. Only six Canadians have ever been taken in the first round: the others are my old high-school acquaintance Adam Loewen (pitcher, fourth overall to the Baltimore Orioles in 2002), Jeff Francis (pitcher, ninth overall to the Colorado Rockies in 2002), Phillipe Aumont (pitcher, 11th overall to the Seattle Mariners in 2007) and Scott Thorman (infielder, 30th overall to the Atlanta Braves in 2000). Lawrie's been getting some very high praise: here's a sampling of it. - Shi Davidi , The Canadian Press "Scouts rave about his raw power and some believe h...