Attempting to Crack the College Guard Code
The college guard creator: a lovable, yet difficult archetype. It seems like there are about thirty-five thousand guards who stand out in college basketball in a given year, and it can be hard to decipher just how wide the gaps are between different players. Despite the events of the 2019 Elite 8, Carsen Edwards is not Damian Lillard. So, how do we crack the code? Well, we can’t. That’s just the way the draft is. But we can try. I scoured through BartTorvik and Basketball-Reference collecting data that could help us project how guard prospects will fare in the NBA. You can check out the full spreadsheet here . Amongst all my research, one statistic stands out: Unassisted Rim Makes per 40 Minutes (I’ll refer to it as UARM/40 at times). In other words, how many self-created around-the-rim shots does a given player make every 40 minutes? I collected nearly 150 different guards’ unassisted rim makes/40 numbers dating back to 2011. While high UARM/40 doesn't automatically yield