How Much Better Do College Basketball Players Get Each Year?

Walter Clayton Jr was recruited to Iona in 2021 as an unranked college basketball recruit. He played 16 MPG as a Freshman for Rick Pitino, scoring 7.3 PPG. His Sophomore year he became a starter and quickly a star. He won MAAC player of the year and decided to transfer to Florida. As a Junior he became even better in a much tougher league, scoring 17.6 PPG and making Second Team All-SEC. As a Senior he became arguably the third best player in the nation and captained his team to a National Championship. Walter Clayton Jr is one of many examples of college basketball players returning to play collegiate and go from role player to starter. I wanted to know, on average, how much does a player improve year to year?

I needed a metric to use to quantitatively determine performance. I chose Bart Torvik’s “PRPG!” for offense and “D-PRPG” for defense. I then gathered data for all power conference players since the 2010-2011 season with a minimum of 50% of their teams minutes played. I then deleted all players who only had 1 eligible year. This left ~7,500 players. From this pool I was able to find the average improvement by collegiate classification.

Here are the results:

FR to SO: +1.44 average increase, +1.45 median increase.

SO to JR: +0.84 average, +0.82 median

JR to SR: +0.56 average, +0.55 median

SR to 5th year SR: +0.17 average, +0.15 median

Using these numbers you can compare players in different classifications. To equalize, use the following adjustments:

FR: +1.42 increase

SO: -0.02 decrease

JR: -0.86 decrease

SR: -1.42 decrease

5th year SR: -1.59 decrease

There are a few potential problems with the results. Firstly, I only took data from players from Power conferences. If I considered all conferences I would have considerably more data. Players who stay longer in college also have more room for development, on the flip side players who leave earlier are likely closer to their ceiling. Also players who only start as Seniors don’t appear in this study.

The top 4 players this year in PRPG! + D-PRPG Per Bart Torvik:

#1 Cooper Flagg: 11.1

#2 Ryan Kalkbrenner 10.7

#3 Johni Broome 10.6

#4 Braden Smith 10.3

The top 4 players this year adjusted for class:

#1 Cooper Flagg: 12.5

#2 Kon Knueppel: 10.8

#3 VJ Edgecombe: 10.2

#4 Derik Queen: 10.2