mrjames
Professor
Posts: 6062
Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
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02-06-18 06:09 PM - Post#246440
Been seeing more and more recently iterations of the same dumb comment: "Harvard had a Top 10 recruiting class in 2016, why is it not dominating the league?" Others will take it a step further and use it as ammunition that recruiting rankings are worthless.
That's absolutely ridiculous. Looking at win shares (merely efficiency ratings plus minutes/poss played to measure contribution to overall wins), Harvard's historic 2016 class has performed, well, historically.
I've got 500 team-class-year combos in my database all the way back to 2002-03. The most productive single team-class-year combo is (unsurprisingly) Cornell's 2009-10 senior class, which posted 21.9 win shares. Their junior season is second at 18.7 win shares and soph one was fourth at 14.5.
18th on that list and top frosh class was 2016-17 Harvard at 11.1 win shares. Next two highest frosh classes were that Cornell group again (9.3 - 30th) and Harvard in 2009-10 (9.2 - 32nd).
This year, even without Bryce Aiken hitting a full win share, the Harvard soph class is leading the league with 7.4 win shares (pacing toward roughly the same number as last year, another Top 20 season and either the second or third most productive soph class campaign of the past 16 seasons).
The problem is that at 1.8 win shares Harvard is getting less productivity out of its junior class than any team except Brown and Dartmouth. With 0.6 win shares, Harvard is getting less out of its freshman class than any team but Cornell, and at 0.1 win shares it is getting less out of its senior class than any other Ivy (to be fair though, the senior class has been pretty bad - none in the top 7 win share team-classes and five of the worst 11 team-classes are senior classes).
The narratives out there are just so lazy. Harvard's 2016 entry class probably won't catch Cornell's 2010 grad class, but at current pacing should easily finish somewhere in the currently wide zone between 1 and 2. Here's the Top 10 best graduating classes in terms of win shares accumulated over the four years:
V1 V2 WSTotal Rank
COR 2010 64.4 1
PENN 2007 45.3 2
HAR 2015 44.0 3
PRIN 2017 38.8 4
PRIN 2013 37.2 5
HAR 2013 36.1 6
YALE 2015 35.2 7
COM 2016 34.0 8
BU 2017 27.8 9
COM 2008 27.5 10
HAR 2020 18.5 30 (2 1/3 years left to go)
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