How many high school stars make it in the NBA? (2019) | Hacker News Reader

How many high school stars make it in the NBA? (2019)

pudding.cool

27 pointsthrowup23850 comments

A 25% chance to make it into the NBA below average tier is pretty good. Even at that level you make way more money than you can make in most careers. I knew a guy who made it to the NFL, rarely played and lost his contract after 3 years. He still was set for life.

You're overlooking the kind of life-long medical expenses that can come from even a short career in pro sports, though. As soon as that teenage springiness and resilience is gone even minor injuries can add up fast.

It's a choice, right? No one is forcing anyone to go into pro sports and I don't think anyone overlooks that. However, a lot of youth that end up in the pros come from distraught backgrounds where the prospect of a better life trumps physical wellbeing some time in the distant future.

This is why you retire before the springiness is gone. Or move to a country with sane health care.

You don't even have to go pro. My younger sis has had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical procedures from a few years of high-school running. Turns out even teenagers can have more motivation than springiness.

What happened? That does not seem typical for running, but serious injuries from higher impact sports is not unusual at all.

They won. They won a lot. She graduated, then her hamstrings tore a couple of good sized chunks out of her pelvis. Doctors agree, it was one weird-ass injury (weird ass-injury). Surgery was only somewhat successful, and in retrospect doctors probably didn't fully understand the nature of her problem. It's now been about 6 years and as many surgeries and she's still dealing with complications. She's simultaneously surprisingly capable and surprisingly crippled. She can hike and bike, but cannot run or sit. Her goal at this point is simply to be able to sit through a lecture without pain.

You're right, this is pretty atypical for runners in general, but unfortunately not for my high school team. Last I'd heard about 50% had been through at least one round of surgery in college, though my sister's definitely one of the worst for wear.

Aren't you kind of presuming these people would not have injuries if they had chosen the non-academic vocation they're most likely qualified for?

Any sustained outdoor work like landscaping, roofing, and plumbing is brutal on the body in the long-term. Even the salty old kitchen workers I've met eventually start falling to bits.

Star athletes are also inculcated with a conscientiousness around health and fitness that desk jockeys and eggheads don't have the benefits of.

Set for life because of the retirement I assume. Wonder how different leagues retirement pensions compare.

IF you take it at age 50, the NBA pension for eligible players (AIUI having been under contract at some point in at least 3 seasons) is ~$800/month for each season played (so minimum $2400/month). That's nothing to sniff at, but it isn't "never work again" money for someone who played a few years in the league (and many probably don't make it 3 years). Among other things, there's the 20+ years between when you stop playing and when you can take the pension to pay for.

Current salary structure has the minimum salary at: $750,000 for a rookie, $870,000 for 1 year experience and $940,000 for 2 years experience. That's $2,560,000 over three years before taxes. It's good money but it's probably not set for life money unless you're in an area where housing is dirt cheap in some parts of the country that basically pays for your house and nothing else after taxes. On the other hand if you're getting traumatic brain injury risk from NFL practice and/or play you may be quite limited in what you can do afterwards. Even worse if you try and make it big and get that traumatic brain injury from high-school or college pay before you get paid.

2.5m is pleanty to live by. Buy a home, invest the rest. It's around 41k a year if you live to 85. Not sure how social security works for that sort of "career".

It's closer to 1.37M after taxes depending on state/local taxes.

These days you can skip a tier and start getting (officially) paid in college! However the previous rules were even better, allowing NBA teams to draft directly out of high school (LeBron, Kobe)

Also there are quite a few "great" players in the graphic that should easily be unanimous superstars (Joel Embiid, Kyrie...)

25% if you're one of the top 100 HS players in the nation, meaning you're already in the top .019%. This seems reasonable.

The mediocre tier is kinda disrespectful. A team needs to be filled and role players are important. I know the NBA type basketball is a star driven variety but those are really good players at that rank.

People have no idea how good "mediocre" guys in top level sports really are. Each of these players would probably kill any amateur team playing alone.

Remind me of Brian Scalabrine, who was never more than a role player, beating a high school player 11-0 _at the age of 43_.

If I recall correctly, he also once said something to the effect that he's closer to Kobe in talent than 99% of the world is to [Scalabrine].

https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2021/03/24/brian-scalabrine...

The real quote is I’m closer to LeBron than you are to me.

I will point out Scal was highly touted by other members of those Celtics teams as being an excellent 1:1 player, not to discount what you’re saying about him being head and shoulders above every amateur in the world, but more pointing out he’s far from the least skilled player to have reached the NBA

I came here to see if someone brought up Scalabrine. Yes, you can find videos of him playing pickup with supposed 'good' HS stars and he destroys them. The quote was "I'm way closer to LeBron than you are to me."

All NBA players are insanely good. And the best NBA players are so good it's hard to comprehend. There's another video of a retired MJ coming out and destroying a new Bulls player who was talking trash. MJ never even took off his sweats.

Or look at shooting...uncovered NBA players almost never miss. Look up Gilbert Arenas shooting half court shots for practice - almost never misses. Or Steph Curry from anywhere on the court.

It's obviously mediocre relative to the nba

Mediocre means literally average and it's obvious than in any normal distribution most players will fall in that category.

Mediocre - first link in search

Mediocre - of only moderate quality; not very good.

Yeah, normal distribution again will tell you that at that level most players are not very good but average.

Honestly, "mediocre" (i.e. really insanely stupid good but not as good as the "great" players) but on the roster for an extended period of time is awesome. I'd imagine it's like being L5 at Google...but with way more money

I don't know much about basketball but isn't another way of looking at this 'the US basketball talent scouting and youth development system is effective and efficient'? Of the top ranked high school players, nearly all become college athletes and 27% become professionals in the most competitive and best paid professional league around. Being able to identify that many of them by their late teens seems pretty good.

It amazes me that Indiana University, under Bob Knight, was so underrepresented in the NBA. It's all anyone in Indiana could talk about in the 80's and 90's, but they only ever produced one guy (that I know of) who made it to the NBA (Steve Alford), and his career was... short-lived. To me, it just goes to show how selective it really is, and how good the star pros actually are.

Isiah Thomas was a big deal. Led the Hoosiers to an NCAA championship before his stellar NBA career (2X NBA champion).

Isiah Thomas

Calbert Cheaney

Alan Henderson

Randy Wittman

Glen Grunwald

Just to a name a few.

Larry Bird was at Indiana for like a semester or something before leaving and attending a local college in French Lick so I'm not sure he really counts.

LOL, I don't think the ISU alums would like you to call their university "a local college in French Lick." Bird was from French Lick[1] though, so maybe that's where you got your wire's crossed?

[1] The Hick from French Lick

I guess I wrong, it wasn't even a semester, it was a month. He transferred TO ISU after attending his local college.

From Wikipedia:

Growing up in French Lick, Indiana, he was a local basketball star. Highly recruited, he initially signed to play college basketball for coach Bob Knight of the Indiana Hoosiers, but Bird dropped out after one month and returned to French Lick and attended a local college. The next year he attended Indiana State University, ultimately playing three years for the Sycamores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bird

I stand corrected.

There are 100,000 high schools in the US.

The NBA drafts 60 new players per year.

Chance of being drafted in any year is 60/100000 = 0.06%. IOW once every 1666 years the best player in your high school team may be drafted.

If you're, say, top-10 in your state, then your chance is way better. Once every ~10 years a kid in top-10 might expect to be drafted (60/500).

What am I missing ?!

The chances stat is missing that NBA draft picks are not evenly distributed between high schools. Some high schools don't have a basketball team, most don't have teams good enough to produce NBA talent and a few have great basketball programs which will attract the best talent and produce more NBA players (ex. Oak Hill Academy has sent 33 players to the league).

Fair enough, but then the title is a bit misleading - being a high school star in of itself doesn't give you more than a dream of making the NBA. Being a star at one of the few schools with a great track record for producing draft picks is a different story!

The real insult is saying that there are so few "high school stars". There are something like 20,000+ highschools in the US. To say that only 100 qualify as stars is disingenuous. Being the top player amongst ten schools qualifies you as a highschool star imho, the best player in a local area and the best anyone local is likely to ever see. But that wont put you anywhere near the top 100 in the nation.

How is this insulting? There probably are not many more than 100 players who qualify as stars, with the term “star” being taken as someone who’s clearly one of the best high school players in the country. You can probably disqualify 90% of those high schools from producing a single player of any real skill compared to the top echelon, and of the remaining 10%, only a small fraction are good enough to get any national recognition.

Non sense.

Most Russians plays chess, only few are grandmasters.

It's a pyramid, stars are only the top players regardless of how many there are at the base.

Why are there so many posts word-policing the use of superlatives? Calling everyone super-extra-awesome-amazing is not helpful to understanding of meaning in this context and is in general harmful to everyone--especially kids who will go years without receiving any honest feedback because it makes adults feel better to say everyone is awesome and give everyone a trophy.

Injuries are a major factor.

I always feel bad for Greg Oden. 1st pick (above Kevin Durant no less), he must have thought he had the world in his hands, but due to injuries he played ~100 games in the NBA.

His career earnings (in 6 seasons) was $24m. For playing a game...

He's fine.

I feel worse for Len Bias.

How do you make those style visualizations?

Am I the only one who doesn’t like it?

I think it's visually ok but kind of hard to follow other than in the abstract. Mousing over players names is basically a crapshoot.

But, it gives the overall sense of the data. It's a bit more style over substance.

As to how it's made, looks like a simple canvas animation.

I mean, it needs to be sped up, but if you sped it up, made mouse overs more informative, it can be a fast way to express large data sets.

I run a simulated football game, visualizations like this can be helpful over large datasets.

It's fun, but slow. And a little frivolous since it could just be a table.

Couldn't most visualizations just be a table unless the row count is too high?

Edit: This is one possible strategy that used to be employed to progressively enhance table into info graphics or data vis. Proposing a table as the best solution seems needlessly reductionist.

I mispoke, there's the rank dimension, which would make this a big table. Still I think the animation took too long to settle, I was bored waiting and annoyance didn't add enough value to final infographic for me. It would be more justifiable if datapoints/balls dropped with the time axis since there'a might be an interesting story there that would warrant animation.

I haven't done visualizations for data on frontend in a decade, but when I looked at this space, the most popular tool was d3.js without much lock-in.

Not sure if that is the case anymore.

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