Today we’re going to look at Shooting Guards/Small Forwards.  

            OK, let me explain a little bit more what I’m trying to do.   Much of my career has been built upon taking seriously questions that are too small and too arcane for any normal, non-obsessive person to take seriously.   There’s an assumption that the public doesn’t have that much patience.   Other people, before me, had drawn up lists of the 100 best baseball players of all time—but none of them really took the question seriously.   They didn’t make any effort to think through the question of what makes a player great, what makes a player valuable.   They simply assumed that they knew the answers to those questions.    They didn’t take the time or make the effort to work through the candidates.   They simply picked the players they liked.  They posed the question, leapt over the discussion, and delivered their answers.  

            I picked up the same questions, but crawled through the issues at a snail’s pace, taking seriously every little sub-question that could be found within the discussion.   I expanded the discussion from the top 100 players to the top 100 first basemen, the top 100 second basemen, etc.    I’m not saying this was better than what other people had done; it was me.  

            People write about Babe Ruth, and they write about Babe Ruth, and they write about Babe Ruth, and for variety they write about Lou Gehrig, and if they’re feeling really ambitious they’ll take a whack at Earle Combs.   I was always interested in the other guys, the Bing Millers and Buddy Myerses and Willie Kamms and Jimmie Wilsons who were on the field with Ruth and Gehrig, but not at the same level.   I’m not saying this was right; I’m saying it was me.

            Well, for many years I have wanted to be able to do similar things with college basketball.   People write about Kemba Walker, and they write about Kemba Walker, and they write about Kemba Walker.   I’m always trying to organize the universe.   OK, he’s the best point guard in the country, and maybe Kyrie Irving is the second base, and maybe Jacob Pullen is the third-best, but. . .what is the list?    Who is number 143, and why is he better than #144? Who ranks where, and how do we know?  What are the real characteristics of winning teams in college basketball?   What is the value of one rebound, as opposed to one turnover?

            I am trying to work on these questions, but the problem is, there is absolutely no way to approach these questions that I can get meaningful answers tomorrow.   We can’t do that, for one thing, because there’s no data base—or anyway, no data base that I know of.    There is nowhere you can go that I know of where you can get the stats you need for all of the players in college basketball.

            So that’s job one; start building the data base.   That’s what I’m working on; it’s early and I don’t have much, but you have to start somewhere.   If the public isn’t patient enough to work through it with me, that’s fine; I’ll write to those who are.   I’ll explain more tomorrow, or the day after or the day after.

            Today’s task is to rank the swing men, the big guard/small forward type players.    The difference between those two positions is pretty subtle, and I think almost everybody who does one job regularly slides over to the other one sometimes.   Among the players I have, these are the best "25s", the best swing men: