With the NBA Playoffs about to start in earnest, and most of the college basketball action confined to transfer notifications, I came across a Tweet that piqued my interest earlier this week.
No, not the coach one, we did that last year.
I’m talking about quantifying the NBA representation from Big East teams. It’s something I have done from time to time, but not in a very long while, and always good for a breezy read.
For background, I went by Basketball References designations in terms of which players had played at least 1 game in the NBA and which program they aligned with, unless I had first hand knowledge otherwise. For example, Jamal Cain finished his college career with Oakland but spent 4 seasons with Marquette and is in the MU practice facility NBA wall so he counts. Sam Hauser did spend 3 years in Milwaukee, but isn’t included in Kasten Gym, so was left out of this.
From here, I decided 5 seasons was a good enough cutoff, so counted only stats since the 2020 season. And I only counted regular season stats, as that allowed us to say the 2024 season was complete. In terms of stats used, I wanted to give people a variety of options for measuring “representation” so went with a few participation trophies (seasons and games played) as well as basic counting stats (points scored and minutes played). Though I couldn’t stop there and also added some basic advanced metrics (VORP and Win Shares) as well as salary earned, because who doesn’t love to see big numbers.
And then, because this was a metric ton of manual labor that I didn’t want confined to the cellar of my laptop, I created a quick Looker Studio dashboard listing all the players and stats I used. So if you want to see all of that data and be able to filter it yourself, I’ve made that quite simple.
DASHBOARD LINK
As a whole 68 unique players have appeared in 7,861 NBA games over the past 5 seasons, scoring 77,557 points in 174,729 minutes. Most impressively, Big East players have combined to make about $1.3 Billion in that time frame.
As for how I’d tier the programs in that time span…
Tier 1: Villanova
Villanova lives alone up here and it’s not close. Pick whichever category you want to measure and Villanova leads the pack. And it’s not just a player or 2 doing the heavy lifting. Between Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, Donte Divincenzo, Josh Hart and Cam Whitmore, the Wildcat alumni are set to be a a dominant force in the NBA for a long time.
One more note, 11 Nova players saw activity in the 2024 season, which matches the next best team (UConn) over 5 years combined. Marquette had the 2nd most with 7 this season.
Tier 2: UConn, Marquette
The reason I like to do tiers rather than straight rankings, is there are too many conflicting data points, to the point where it becomes too semantic to decide who is ahead of the other. So I’ll leave that up to your preference.
What I can say is these 2 teams are significantly ahead of the rest of the non-Nova programs in most categories. They are the only 2 teams with 1,000+ games played by its players over the last 5 years as well as $200M+ in salary earned.
One additional note of interest, Jimmy Butler has been the best Big East player over this time and it’s not close. And to think this doesn’t even include any of his playoff heroics.
Tier 3: Georgetown, DePaul
This is where it got pretty tough.
Georgetown has the 4th most players, seasons and minutes played, but it’s living mostly off its history. Of the 3 players that saw action in 2024, Otto Porter retired, Jeff Green is almost there as well, leaving them with just 1 active player in the NBA, Omer Yurtseven.
DePaul, funny enough, is the inverse. It has very little historical impact but is seeing a resurgence of legitimate players thriving in the NBA with Max Strus, Paul Reed and Javon Freman-Liberty all making an impact with 20+ games in 2024. Strus in particular is 12th of all Big East players since 2020 with 11.9 win shares.
Tier 4: Creighton, Butler, Xavier, St. John’s
And this is where the guessing took over.
Creighton has a legitimate shout at being in Tier 3, but its only active player being Doug McDermott dropped them down a level in my eyes, as he’s been the only NBA player from Creighton the past 3 seasons.
Butler is in a very similar boat, where Gordon Hayward is the only active player, and has amassed 98% of the impressive $155M earned since 2020.
St. John’s and Xavier each have had 5 players, though X is ahead in most categories compared to Red Storm alumni.
Tier 5: Providence, Seton Hall
Providence probably deserves to be in Tier 4, or at least separate from Seton Hall’s tier. But I couldn’t get over only having 2 players in 5 seasons see the floor in an NBA game, even if those 2 have stuck around. Kris Dunn hasn’t lived up to the top-5 billing, but is definitely on the upswing once more.
Seton Hall is MIA where the NBA is concerned. They rank last in seasons, minutes, points, VORP and salary.
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