Projecting the future of Xavier basketball

One of the great things about college basketball is the potential to watch a player's development throughout his career. The age 18-22 range holds within it the possibility for huge leaps and bounds of growth that aren't rivaled in any age group except for the very young. In the basketball context, that leaves fans and coaches and scouts looking at the information they currently have on a player and trying to extrapolate from that what the player might end up being. Over the next how many ever days it takes us, we're going to do just that with the returning guys on Xavier's roster.

We're going to be using the similarity scores generated by Ken Pomeroy, honorary patron saint of bannersontheparkway.com. Pomeroy weights 19 statistical categories - more information can be had here if you're curious - to develop a score between 0-1000 regarding how similar any two players are. Class is taken into consideration, so freshmen will be compared with historical freshman years, sophomores with sophomores, et c. A match of over 850 is a useful comparison, and anything over 900 is a great match.

Obviously, to use this tool we need players who will (a) be on the team this year and (b) have a track record at the college level. Edmond Sumner, RaShid Gaston, and Malcolm Bernard don't fit the first category and the incoming crop of freshmen fails as a whole and as individuals to clear the second hurdle. That leaves us with Trevon Bluiett, JP Macura, Sean O’Mara, Tyrique Jones, Quentin Goodin, and Kaiser Gates to inspect.

We did this a couple of years ago and had a lot of fun with it. Obviously, it’s not going to be a perfect projection of what each guy is going to do as much as it is an inspection of where other, similar players have gone over their careers. I’ve semi-arbitrarily chosen to start with Quentin Goodin (which should be up later today) and we’ll work from there.