{"id":454,"date":"2012-01-16T07:51:07","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T13:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/best-players-by-state\/"},"modified":"2012-01-16T07:51:07","modified_gmt":"2012-01-16T13:51:07","slug":"best-players-by-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/best-players-by-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Best players by state"},"content":{"rendered":"

After anointing Luke Martinez the best D-I player from North Dakota<\/a> a couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to figure out who had geographical bragging rights in each state and Canadian province on the continent. The table below summarizes that research. I\u2019ve taken the kPOY formula out of the garage for the first time this season and used it to determine \u201cbest\u201d in these cases. (We\u2019ll get to the issue of revealing the first kPOY top ten list later in the week.)<\/p>\n

In case the trivia of the best player in each state doesn\u2019t excite you, I\u2019ve added more trivia. The number of players from each state that have registered at least 10% of his team\u2019s minutes is listed along with how that translates to a per-capita (one million capitas, technically) figure. The list is sorted in decreasing order by the latter number.<\/p>\n

Drew Cannon did the definitive work<\/a> on the geography of D-I talent in the off-season, so I\u2019m not going to make any groundbreaking claims that add to his exhaustive work. But there are a couple of things I find interesting about the per-capita distribution of players. First, the deep south produces more players than I expected, basically leading the nation in player density as a region. Drew\u2019s work showed that more of these players are at low-major programs than in most states, so it\u2019s not like there\u2019s a gold mine of talent there, but at least there are players. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s more than you can say for New England where kids just don\u2019t care as much about hoops relative to the rest of the country. The only player from Maine getting significant minutes is Notre Dame\u2019s Tom Knight<\/a>, and he might quibble with my use of \u201csignificant\u201d. Sure, you can say the lack of urban areas suppresses the count in places like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, but that doesn\u2019t explain why the number of players from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts is roughly on par with those from Alaska when scaled for population. <\/p>\n

Rk                     Players Per 1M  Best player            <\/u>\n 1   District of Columbia 22    36.6   Thomas Robinson, Kansas\n 2   Maryland            108    18.7   Will Barton, Memphis\n 3   Louisiana            79    17.4   Scott Saunders, Belmont\n 4   Georgia             167    17.2   Tony Mitchell, Alabama\n 5   Mississippi          51    17.2   Isaiah Canaan, Murray State\n 6   Indiana              87    13.4   Cody Zeller, Indiana\n 7   Virginia            107    13.4   Mike Scott, Virginia\n 8   Illinois            169    13.2   Anthony Davis, Kentucky\n 9   Tennessee            80    12.6   Chris Crawford, Memphis\n10   North Carolina      118    12.4   Ryan Kelly, Duke\n\n11   Delaware             11    12.3   Jarrett Mann, Stanford\n12   Iowa                 34    11.2   Doug McDermott, Creighton\n13   Arkansas             32    11.0   A.J. Walton, Baylor\n14   Alabama              52    10.9   JaMychal Green, Alabama\n15   New Jersey           94    10.7   Tyshawn Taylor, Kansas\n16   Michigan             94     9.5   Draymond Green, Michigan St.\n17   Texas               229     9.1   J'Covan Brown, Texas\n18   New York            173     8.9   Kevin Jones, West Virginia\n19   South Carolina       41     8.9   LaRon Dendy, Middle Tennessee\n20   Minnesota            47     8.9   Jordan Taylor, Wisconsin\n\n21   Florida             166     8.8   John Henson, North Carolina\n22   Nebraska             16     8.8   Antoine Young, Creighton\n23   Missouri             52     8.7   Marcus Denmon, Missouri\n24   South Dakota          7     8.6   Chad White, South Dakota St.\n25   Kentucky             37     8.5   Darius Miller, Kentucky\n26   Ohio                 98     8.5   Jared Sullinger, Ohio State\n27   Kansas               24     8.4   Kyle Weems, Missouri State\n28   Nevada               22     8.1   Pierre Jackson, Baylor\n29   Oregon               30     7.8   Mike Moser, UNLV\n30   California          286     7.7   Rob Jones, St. Mary's\n\n31   Pennsylvania         97     7.6   Herb Pope, Seton Hall\n32   Wisconsin            43     7.6   Jake Koch, Northern Iowa\n33   Utah                 20     7.2   Brandon Davies, BYU\n34   Wyoming               4     7.1   Adam Waddell, Wyoming\n35   Connecticut          25     7.0   T.J. Robinson, Long Beach State\n36   Oklahoma             25     6.7   Noah Hartsock, BYU\n37   Rhode Island          7     6.7   Erik Murphy, Florida\n38   Washington           40     5.9   Joe Harris, Virginia\n39   Alaska                4     5.6   Damen Bell-Holter, Oral Roberts\n40   Arizona              35     5.5   Ryan Evans, Wisconsin\n\n41   West Virginia        10     5.4   Todd Mayo, Marquette\n42   Massachusetts        31     4.7   Evan Smotrycz, Michigan\n43   North Dakota          3     4.5   Luke Martinez, Wyoming\n44   New Mexico            8     3.9   Chad Adams, New Mexico\n45   Idaho                 6     3.8   Mitch Bruneel, Utah State\n46   Colorado             19     3.8   Dario Hunt, Nevada\n47   Vermont               2     3.2   Matt Glass, Vermont\n48   New Hampshire         4     3.0   Luke Apfeld, Vermont\n49   Ontario              40     3.0   Kevin Pangos, Gonzaga\n50   Nova Scotia           2     2.1   Chris Johnson, St. Bonaventure\n\n51   Montana               2     2.0   Josh Huestis, Stanford\n52   Quebec               10     1.3   Kris Joseph, Syracuse\n53   British Columbia      5     1.1   Robert Sacre, Gonzaga\n54   Maine                 1     0.8   Tom Knight, Notre Dame\n55   Hawaii                1     0.7   Jeremiah Ostrowski, Hawaii\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After anointing Luke Martinez the best D-I player from North Dakota a couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to figure out who had geographical bragging rights in each state and Canadian province on the continent. The table below summarizes that research. I\u2019ve taken the kPOY formula out of the garage for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}