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...