Top 55 Players in the Big East

[TAMU Eagle]

BTW,
I will come back and inviserate your slotting when you complete your annual "Top 55".

Links to part 2 and 3 and are already above! Eviscerate away my dude!

Man, IDK what kind of CRED you have accumulated in the past, but so far your list gets more laughs than an early Richard Pryor stand-up.

Big Nate at #34 is just a joke and your diss for Reeves and John are inexplicable AND your miss on big WAHAB pads my critic.

It's almost like you guys are out of touch with this league.

CRED? I don't know about any cred. Jon Rothestein retweeted me once. That set my cred back a few points. I'm just a random basketball nerd who spends his summers indoors researching basketball statistics rather than playing outside. Honestly, I don't have any cred beyond organizing and contributing to this for the past 5 years. Every year we've made some really good calls, some just laughably bad calls, but mostly we make picks that are 4-5 spots within everyone else picks but that 4-5 spots is enough to get people riled up because we love our guys dammit. I do try to back my rankings up with stats. Sometimes they give insight that the eye test misses, other times the math can be blinding to something obvious.

For the guys you listed, I'll try to give you an insight to my reasoning. Big Nate got punished for his defense. In 84 defensive possessions last season, Big Nate gave up 87 points. That's a points per possession allowed of 1.036 which was in the 8th percentile for D1 last season. I love love love Big Nate's offense but hate his defense. John, talk to most Marquette fans and they will tell you I ranked him too high. He's a block or bust defender and his offense was a struggle last season. That being said, if his wrist is fully healed he could definitely outperform. Wahab I mention in his blurb how I think this could be an undersell and may outplay that ranking. Reeves was one of the only players to not be nationally ranked in a single category KenPom. KenPom ranks the top 500 player in all the major advanced stats and Reeves doesn't appear once. Also, like Big Nate, he was punished for his defense. In 109 defensive possessions, Reeves gave up 111 points for a ppp allowed 1.018 (9th percentile).

I do put thought and research into each ranking, I try to keep them as objective as possible. Despite that, I'm going to be totally wrong on a lot of these! That's part of the fun.

[kayako]

My team's players are ranked too low blah blah blah. I think it's a reasonable ranking.

[Xuperman]

Your rankings are not nearly as bad as my attempt to spell the word "eviscerate".

That homemade number cruncher spits out some odd slotting The Horchler one in particular.....you're basically predicting Rhoden 2nd team All BE and in no world is Justin Moore out of the top 15. Wackiest of all is your omission of KyKy Tandy. Apparently your eye test needs glasses. Badly.

[Xuperman]

On the bright side, you are one helluva talented writer. Your detailed player profiles are as good as it gets!

[Hall2012]

Your rankings are not nearly as bad as my attempt to spell the word "eviscerate".

That homemade number cruncher spits out some odd slotting The Horchler one in particular.....you're basically predicting Rhoden 2nd team All BE and in no world is Justin Moore out of the top 15. Wackiest of all is your omission of KyKy Tandy. Apparently your eye test needs glasses. Badly.

With 3 teammates in his top 10, perhaps he feels Moore simply won't have the usage to to make a greater impact than some of the guys ahead of him? And what's wrong with predicing Rhoden 2nd team All BE? I agree 1st team is more likely but it's just one guy sharing his opinion, there's room for disagreement.

[Hall2012]

I also struggle to see why X fans are so eager to annoint Kyky Tandy. He had a nice freshman year (6.7pts/.9asst/1.3reb) and I think he projects out to a solid 4-year contributer who should contend for All BE honors as a senior (maybe even as a junior) but I don't see anything historic here. Maybe he'll take a huge jump and surprise me, but I see a good role player for this year rather than a star. Give the kid some time.

[GumbyDamnit!]

I think TAMU did a nice job. From someone who attempted to put together my own Top 50 list, I can attest that there are so many variables that it is really tough to figure out which should take priority, and how to balance overall talent vs. overall contributions to the specific team. Then all of us have our opinions about who we think will step up this year. I chose a few players, that based on last year would be lower but figured they'd take a step forward (Freemantle, Nze, Rhoden, Champagnie, etc.). It's just gut feelings there. I had no idea how to rank transfers, redshirts and frosh. TAMU and I certainly disagree on some players but both gave it a shot. I agree with him about D. If someone scores at will but is a turnstile, it's tough to factor both in competently.

After each game you can bemoan a single ranking, but let's get a couple of games under our belts before claiming victory in the debate. Last night, I would have had JRE in front of Gillespie and Daniels in front of Justin Moore from Nova's standpoint. But CG and JM might go off tonight and make me rethink it all again. I think that'll be the nature of this until teams settle in.

[FriarJ]

It’s a bunch of statistical driven crap. The eye test and actual gameplay should matter and I dare anyone to tell me that Nate friggin Watson is the 34th best player in the conference after seeing him play. He missed half the season with an MCL problem last year and played limited minutes with a giant brace on. Every coach in the league is going to be game planning to stop him for Pete’s sake.

Also, PC has one of the top if not the top defense in the league so Watson is hardly the gushing sieve described by the writer. Hard to take any of it serious when you screw something up that badly.

[XUFan09]

I also struggle to see why X fans are so eager to annoint Kyky Tandy. He had a nice freshman year (6.7pts/.9asst/1.3reb) and I think he projects out to a solid 4-year contributer who should contend for All BE honors as a senior (maybe even as a junior) but I don't see anything historic here. Maybe he'll take a huge jump and surprise me, but I see a good role player for this year rather than a star. Give the kid some time.

I think he will be one of the better scorers in the conference as an upperclassman, but man, his defense is *bad*. He basically couldn't see the court in the second half of the game versus Bradley because of his defense. With how bad he was at defense last year, I completely understand him not being even ranked.

[Django]

By the end of January Christian Bishop will be on every BE first team projection.