Lately we have all been craving any sports discussion and our basketball program has been able to fill at least some of that void with all of the recent roster news.  I've participated in a few lively debates with friends on email, on the MGoBlog Forum, and over at UMHoops regarding such topics as recruiting rankings, player rotation for next year, and the state of turnover in college basketball rosters.  These topics combined with a little quarantine boredom prompted me to crave more data and information.  

I reached out to Seth to inquire whether he had built a player database for basketball to compliment his amazing version for football.  He informed me that he hadn't but encouraged me to work on one.  I dug up an old laptop that had some info from the 1990's on it and started working on a database.  Below is a link to a public Google Sheet file with recruiting data for every Michigan recruit dating back until the Fab Five.  It doesn't rival Seth's football version for content, but it has what I've been able to build so far.  

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11HE1zaCHqtsxQSSLjtwcjHVVYPEE5-sYC1foFO1mblE/edit?usp=sharing

Here are some things to know about what is and isn't in there:

• I am confident I have every recruit we've had - even some that never made it to campus.  
• I am also confident I tracked down the outcome of each recruit's Michigan tenure and whether it ended in graduation, transfer, NBA, etc.  The only one I'm not sure of is a 1996 recruit named Brandun Hughes.  He only has one year of stats, but I don't know why he left.
• I assigned every player a "position" from 1 thru 5, with 0.5 indicating that they frequently played both positions.  (i.e. Livers is listed as 3.5 and Brooks is listed as 1.5)
• I have all of the recruiting information I can access from ESPN, 247, and Rivals.  I also have some older anecdotal data from an old UMHoops post. 
• I do *NOT* have access to any real recruiting information from before about 2002.  If anyone has access to old sites, databases, magazines, etc. and would like to share them we can build this more like Seth's football database.  

My hope is that we can build this into something useful that we can leverage for future posts, discussions, and debates.  For example, this database shows is that roster turnover is not a new thing.  Since the Fab Five just 36% of recruits stay four years at Michigan and that's nearly equaled by players who transfer (25%).  Guys leaving for the NBA has ebbed over the years but still represents 17% of all players. 

I was also able to compare some old recruits to the talented incoming class to create some comparable expectations.  There are some on the board projecting Hunter Dickinson into a significant role next year because of his star ratings and need.  While I am excited for his future, the track record of centers playing even 20mpg as true freshmen is almost non-existent.  The minutes played does somewhat correlate to star ratings, however.  Some barely play at all (Teske, Horford, Morgan), many played a part-time role due to talent and/or need (Wagner, Doyle, Donnal) and even the best ones that are closest to his recruiting ratings top out at barely 20mpg (McGary, Traylor, Baston).  You have to go all the way back to Juwan himself to find a center that played starter's minutes as a freshman. 

I appreciate any and all feedback on this.  I'm happy to make enhancements or adjustments if people find value in it.  I haven't put a lot of analytics or pivot tables to this yet given that so much of the older data isn't filled in yet.