What cities have the most basketball talent?

In this post, we are going to look at two general questions. First, what areas of the country do basketball players come from. Second, what areas of the country are true basketball hotbeds?

A key concern whenever we start graphing spatial data is whether all we are actually doing is mapping the underlying general population. You may recall that we wrote an article highlighting just that problem a few months ago. In the image below, we show the total number of recruits by state from 2003 to the Present.

There are three caveats to this map. First, the data comes from 247Sports which does not seem to have consistent coverage of recruits for all years, especially future years. Second, prep schools that recruit nationally will skew this graph somewhat. New Hampshire’s recruits are almost entirely due to Brewster Academy. Third, while obvious this map only looks at the contiguous United States. A complete table of all states and the District of Columbia is below.

How then has recruiting moved over time? To get an initial answer at that question, I used data from the National Federation of State High School Associations on basketball participation rates to estimate the percentage of four star or better recruits per 10,000 high school basketball players for each state. I even put it in gif form in case you need screen saver.

That is the view on the state level. What about the city level? If you had to guess, what city would you guess has produced the most recruits over the last two decades? Chicago? New York? Los Angeles?

All wrong. It’s Houston.

If we broke out New York City into the Boroughs only Brooklyn would make the top 20 cities. Certain cities on this list like Memphis, Baltimore, Orlando, and Fort Lauderdale produce a large amount of recruits with relatively low population totals. As a general note, we did not age adjust these numbers which we suspect would produce a somewhat different curve.

While cities can produce a lot of D1 talent, certain cities produce far more of the cream of the crop. The following are the cities that produce the most four star or better talent, with another caveat. Because of the proliferation of prep schools that recruit nationally, the original version of this had Mouth of Wilson, VA as the second highest producer of basketball talent in the country. As Mouth of Wilson has a little over 1300 people that fact seems a bit surprising until one realizes that is where Oak Hill Academy is located. To correct for that problem, we simply removed cities that are home to major basketball prep schools. We recognize that we should give back recruits to various cities, but even that presents a problem. For example, is Carmelo Anthony from Baltimore or New York? Since we did not feel well educated enough to adjudicate those kinds of questions and we already reached the caring is creepy level, we’ve excluded all of them for the time being.

The best basketball city in the country at a crude level of generality is Memphis, TN. Memphis has produced the most four star or better recruits since 2003. Furthermore, Memphis has dramatically fewer people than any of the other schools in the top 5. Fans of Minnesota will remember that Memphis is Andre Hollins’s hometown.

In our final post of this series, we will look at where top D1 programs recruit and get into a little predictive demography.