Adjusting for teammate effects in evaluating college prospects for the NBA draft

Joseph Kuehn

Journal of Productivity Analysis, 2023, vol. 60, issue 3, No 6, 295-314

Abstract: Abstract Evaluating amateur basketball players based on their college performances is challenging due to the impact of teammates on observed output. In this paper, I look at the effect that college teammates have on a player’s draft position and develop predictions for NBA player performance that account for these effects. I find that players that score more in college due to their teammates are drafted higher, indicating that college choice can significantly impact a prospect’s draft position. I then use the player predictions in a matching model to evaluate how effectively NBA teams account for complementarities between players when evaluating college talent. The results suggest that teams could improve the offensive value added of their draft picks by 20.33% by better taking into account teammate effects.

Keywords: Productivity spillovers; NBA draft; Evaluating college prospects; Teammate effects; Matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11123-023-00695-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jproda:v:60:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s11123-023-00695-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11123/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11123-023-00695-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Productivity Analysis is currently edited by William Greene, Chris O'Donnell and Victor Podinovski

More articles in Journal of Productivity Analysis from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().