Interesting article in Slate. This shocked me:
Out of all the big schools, NBA teams likely fall harder for Dukies because of their NCAA tournament success. In Stumbling on Wins, economists David J. Berri and Martin B. Schmidt find that players who appear in the Final Four the year they're drafted get a boost of 12 draft positions. Berri and Schmidt believe that this boost is unwarranted. One of the "statistically significant factors … that lead to less productivity in the NBA," they write, is "playing for an NCAA champion the year drafted."
I'll have to look at the model itself, but this is somewhat surprising if plausible. It makes intuitive sense, but NBA teams don't normally take the draft lightly and do prep work. On the other hand, as the years go by I've become more skeptical about the ability of institutions to squeeze all efficiencies out of any ...
