Consensus Rankings of 2009-10 Season

Once the college season commenced, I started keeping track of the rankings of players on the three major sites I followed, as well as my own. Once I stumbled upon nba-draft.com, I added them to the consensus as they seemed to update their Big Board fairly regularly, and it was a quality website so I felt it was a great addition. During the periods which NBADraft.net hasn't kept their big board current, I have dropped them from the rankings so they aren't as skewed.

Basically, I have logged these so that we could get a true feel for how player rankings have changed throughout the year. DraftExpress.com is the only site which keeps a history of some sort on rankings, and this transparency is a good thing because it gives their audience a better view of how a player's stock changed throughout the year in the eyes of DX. However, they only keep track of a history on how a players standing changed in their Mock Drafts, but I'm more curious as to how Big Boards change.

This led to me tracking the change of the Big Boards of the "major" NBA draft websites. The file where you can see these rankings can be found here. After the break, I'll give an overview of how it is all set up.

First off, I'll explain how it's laid out.

The dates of the updates and names of the boards I used are located on the sheet labeled "Legend". Pretty self-explanatory.

The order of names is currently set up for the most recent update, the one compiled on March 24th, 2010. When a player does not have at least 3/4 of the "panel" ranking them, I am left guessing where to slot them in the order I organize them in. This order is just a way to make the process of logging names easier, as well as determining the top-25 for my updates that I post on various forums.

You'll notice a lot of blank places next to names. I left them blank because I don't want to label all of those players as "n+1", where "n" is the highest ranking that that website gave to a player, mainly because this would lead to some relatively unknown or ignored players to have their rankings negatively skewed and that wouldn't truly reflect where they should be at. I know in my case, I do not rank a player unless I've seen them at least twice, and in the case of the International players, I only added them this past week because I felt I had read enough about them so that while even though I hadn't seen a full game of theirs, I could estimate where I felt they should be ranked.

Also, you'll notice that my list of players gradually increased to the point where it's at now. This is due to me not wanting to log all 100 players on the ESPN or DX boards if they don't hold a high ranking (I deemed "high" as ~60) on at least one board. To those who say I wasn't being thorough if I didn't log every ranking... that may be the case, but it takes a good chunk of time to update and if I had logged every ranking every week, my list would likely have over 250 names and it would be tedious work when a lot of it just isn't necessary.

This may have caused some players like Trey Thompkins to start being logged much later than they would have if I logged every player... but overall I feel this is a good reflection of when players came into the public eye. In the case of Wesley Johnson, the first couple weeks I only logged up to around 30 because I wasn't sure how many names I wanted to keep track of due to time constraints. However, I can say with confidence that he wasn't top-25, and almost certainly not top-30 on any board the first week.

As far as my boards, not having the time or resources to see all the players I wanted until the season wore on and games became more and more televised, I was not able to "catch up" on all the prospects I may have missed ranking initially. So while some may say, "he had Alex Oriakhi as the 41st ranked prospect at one point?!" I hope I can assure you that I did not truly feel he was the 41st best prospect overall, but rather that he was 41st out of the 43 players I had ranked that week. As I watched more and more teams and more and more games, my rankings became more defined and guys like Oriakhi, while they stayed in relatively the same position at the bottom, had their ranking drop.

You'll also see roughly a month layoff where I did not update the board. This was for a variety of reasons, one of which because websites were not updating their big boards, and another because I was busy trying to watch as many games as I could to expand my list.

Alright, that's enough talk... enjoy the file.