My favorite basketball recruiting blog specializes in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and specifically, basketball recruiting for the ACC, and I wish they covered even more. The cool thing is that this site never reports things as facts when they are just rumors, and they are very careful to point out that they aren’t really in the business of predicting where a certain player might decide to go to school.
I first heard about the site while listening to the Al Woods Show over the summer and I went to check it out, because the guy who was being interviewed by Al really knew what he was talking about. It was obvious that he understood not just how to judge basketball talent but how those guys fit into a basketball system.
But even after saying that, they have shown several times that they have a pulse on where players are going and how good those players are going to be. The rating of players on the site is designed to gauge where a player might end up, success-wise, in their basketball career. Most (well, all) recruiting sites pretty much rate any player who will end up at a DI school as a four-star or five-star player, but that doesn’t really tell how that player will contribute. There are hundreds of four and five star high school players who never even start in college and certainly never sniff the pros.
The guys over at ACCBasketballRecruiting.com do a terrific job of analyzing the actual impact of a player. For instance, they didn’t just pick Wake Forest commitment (and current freshman) Al-Farouq Aminu as a ‘five star player’, they said specifically that Aminu would start right away and probably go be able to turn pro after one year, AND that he has the potential to start in the pros at some point. That tells Wake Forest fans a LOT more than he’s ‘five-star’. Pretty awesome. I also like how they run through the entire ACC basketball schedule and break out the ticket options for teams by each game. This is their link for UNC Basketball Tickets, you can see what I mean.
