Donte DiVincenzo recorded just one start as a redshirt freshman before winning Most Outstanding Player honors at the 2018 Final Four as a sophomore. A few weeks after that, he was taken with the 17th pick in the NBA draft.
Let's agree to call that player development.
As you might expect, Villanova's Jay Wright tops my rankings of coaches who have shown the best results in terms of player development over the past eight years. Wright is joined at the top of this list by Utah's Larry Krystkowiak and Michigan State's Tom Izzo. Congratulations, men.
Using the "Box Plus/Minus" statistic that sports-reference.com has calculated for every college player since 2010-11, I looked at year-to-year variations for major conference regulars who averaged 20 or more minutes per game in at least two consecutive campaigns.
BPM is a handy way of measuring player development because, like ESPN.com's NBA-focused Real Plus-Minus, it starts by tracking team points scored and allowed when a given player is on the floor. Most crucially, BPM (like RPM) then adjusts for the performance strength or weakness of that player's four teammates and five opponents.
Pulling in eight years of BPM results for major conference hoops produced a data set of 2,045 player seasons. Then, to adjust for the predictable influences of player experience (sophomores tend to improve more over the previous season than juniors, who tend to improve more than seniors) and prior performance (players with low BPMs tend to improve more the following season), I derived an "expected" year-to-year variation for each player based on those two factors.
Coaches were rewarded not for mere year-to-year improvement shown by one of their players but for improvement above and beyond what a player of the same profile would be expected to record. I call the resulting stat Growth Above Replacement Player.
In other words, Wright's returning players since 2010-11 have, on average, recorded BPMs that are 1.30 points better per 100 possessions than would be expected from the entire population of major conference players showing similar previous season profiles.
Not seeing your favorite coach? Don't worry. GARP is one stat that, by its very construction, clusters coaches around zero.
A zero here actually means your players are staying on track in terms of year-to-year improvement. In fact, when you recruit top talent, a coveted zero means your blue chippers are maintaining their performance lead over their peers.
For example, you probably don't need a fancy new metric to know guys such as Mike Krzyzewski and Bill Self are pretty good at what they do. Sure enough, the elite talent signed by Coach K and Self is hitting the "expected" target for development virtually on the bull's-eye. That's a good thing.
(For the record, Providence's Ed Cooley is literally hitting the bullseye. His GARP clocks in at precisely 0.00, and again, that's a good thing.)
Conversely, coming in way below zero for GARP is a very bad thing. Now prepare for a shocker. The individuals fitting that description in my data set of 113 head coaches dating to 2010-11 are all now, shall we say, pursuing other opportunities. I won't name names, but let's just say short coaching tenures go together with extreme negative GARPs like "Bill Walton" goes with "Dave Pasch." (Sorry, Dave.)
What might GARP be able to tell us about coaches and player development? Four early thoughts:
Your eyes are correct: Wright is indeed good at this player development thing
Recency effects -- in the form of two national titles in the past three seasons -- tell us Wright should be at the top of a list such as this. Still, what's interesting is the numbers here go back to Villanova's (relative) dark age. The Wildcats lost in the first round of the 2013 NCAA tournament as a No. 9 seed (after missing the tournament the year before), but that was also the season JayVaughn Pinkston recorded a huge leap in performance as a sophomore.
Pinkston would not be the last Nova player to do so. Whether you're talking about James Bell's junior year, Darrun Hilliard's junior season or, more recently, Eric Paschall's junior campaign (sensing a trend here), Wright has consistently produced and/or benefited from players who post significant year-to-year improvements over and above their expected BPMs. And he was doing so long before he started winning national titles.
Speaking of inspiring tales of player development from the state of Pennsylvania ...
Pat Chambers?
Yes, Pat Chambers. While you weren't paying attention to Penn State last season, both Tony Carr and Josh Reaves were recording year-to-year BPM upswings that are rare when your name isn't Victor Oladipo. Moreover, Carr and Reaves were following in improvement footsteps left behind in prior years by sophomore-version Brandon Taylor and (going way back) junior-year Tim Frazier.
None of which means Chambers is definitely some kind of extreme player-development wiz or even that he's primarily responsible for those four player seasons. All I know is returning Nittany Lions have tended to be better than would've been expected based on their prior season profiles. Make of that what you will.
Watch out for this new guy, John Calipari
Coach Cal just barely misses the "returning player" sample-size cut for inclusion here, courtesy of, of course, all those one-and-dones he keeps churning through. With a relatively "veteran" Kentucky team set to take the floor this season, however, Calipari will at last qualify for the GARP list in 2019. When he does, he's likely to show a very good number. Sophomore-version Willie Cauley-Stein is one strong wind in those numerical sails, a bit like the GARP rocket-boost Frank Martin receives from senior-year Sindarius Thornwell.
Where's John Beilein?
Short answer: With Coach K, Self and the main body of everyone else who's good, right around zero. Still, Beilein's absence from the top 15 might seem surprising. No fewer than seven of his players have been drafted in the first round over the past eight years. All but one of those players left school early, and several arrived in Ann Arbor as relatively unheralded recruits. Then again, perhaps there's no contradiction between a pipeline such as that and the elevated level of play often apparent from early in the college career of an NBA-bound Michigan rotation player. In fact, Beilein might give us occasion to consider whether what's commonly termed player development might not look remarkably similar in some cases to exceptionally perceptive scouting of recruits. The safest bet is he's very good at all of the above.