Freshmen Playing Time Part 1

This week the Boston Celtics announced Brad Stevens as their new head coach. It was a move that made a lot of sense for Stevens. The former Butler coach loves the X’s and O’s of the game, but doesn’t have nearly the same love for recruiting battles. In the NBA, for better or worse, he will have to deal with the talent he has on hand. His job will be to maximize that talent, not to attract it to town.

Speaking of recruiting, that was a topic I wanted to talk about today, at least tangentially. Today I am updating a table I first presented 18 months ago. The table shows D1 coaches in major conferences and how willing they are to give minutes to freshmen. To no one’s surprise, John Calipari and Rick Barnes show up at the top of this list. Both coaches have been willing to give major minutes to first-year players. On the flip side coaches like Bruce Weber, Bo Ryan, Mike Brey, and Buzz Williams have been unwilling to use freshmen in their rotation. When I ran this table 18 months ago, I called it the “anti-recruiting tool” because for these coaches the lack of commitment to fist year-players could be a detriment on the recruiting trail.

Elite recruits want to showcase their game for NBA scouts, and a large part of recruiting is promising elite players the chance to play right away. When a coach like Bo Ryan has been known to red-shirt McDonald’s All-Americans, that likely prevents Wisconsin from competing for some of the top high school athletes.

The following table shows major conference coaches with at least 5 years of D1 coaching experience and the average number of minutes they have given to freshmen during the last 11 seasons. I include all schools where the coach was employed as a head coach. I.e. this table includes John Calipari’s time at Memphis as well as his time at Kentucky.