The NBA draft early entry list is pretty much set at this point with the Kentucky starting five making a joint announcement that they'd all be coming back next season.  Just kidding.  They surely haven't attended a class since Thanksgiving, and all five will play in the NBA the next time they take the court.  Due to a quirk in the rules, we may still see some outward movement.  While anyone currently in the draft has already lost their collegiate eligibility as of April 11th, the NBA's deadline is not until next Sunday meaning that we could see a last minute change of heart or two from guys who are returning.  As most of the guys who haven't declared have affirmed they're coming back, any additional entries would be very surprising indeed.

This season there were 8 freshman, 13 sophomores and 15 juniors (counting only DI players) that have declared.  Those numbers are on the low side.  Only once since the "one and done" rule came into effect have fewer than eight freshman left for the NBA, and only once in those six years has fewer than 36 players jumped early.  In fact while the number of sophomores leaving is the second highest, due in large part to the returns last year of Harrison Barnes, Jared Sullinger, Terrence Jones, and Perry Jones, the number of juniors is also tied for its lowest level ever.

YR	FR	SO	JR	TOTAL
2012	8	13	15	36
2011	8	9	22	39
2010	12	15	22	49
2009	4	11	21	36
2008	13	9	15	37
2007	8	5	17	30

As always there were a few curious departures:

*Justin Hamilton of Louisiana State may well be 6-11 or 7-0 which makes for an intriguing prospect, but a guy that size who is still unproductive in general needs that last year of seasoning.

*Villanova's Dominic Cheek was once one of the best SG recruits in the country.  After taking two years to crack the Cats' starting five, he'll take his sub 40% from the field to the pros somewhere.

*Khris Middleton had an outstanding sophomore season which put him on the map at Texas A&M, but a coaching change and injuries led to a disappointing junior season.  He has first round pick potential, but he needed another year in college to re-establish himself.

The rest went about as expected.  James McAdoo and Cody Zeller stuck around to prevent the one and done number from cracking double digits again.  Among upperclassmen, JRs Mason Plumlee, Kenny Boynton, and surprisingly, SO CJ Leslie were among the those who will return to college next season.

Ashton Pankey, 2011-12

To say Ashton Pankey is an enigma or frustrating would probably be an understatement. Coming into the season, expectations weren't that high for Pankey. He had sat out almost all of his freshman year (playing just one minute in the season opener) before getting a medical redshirt. That came on the heels of missing the entire prior season while he was in high school due to injuries as well. Despite having been well schooled playing for legendary high school coach Bob Hurley at Saint Anthony's in New Jersey, Pankey had little in the way of a recruiting profile, picking Maryland over runner-up Houston.

The hope was that maybe Pankey could be brought along slowly and develop into a contributor over the next few seasons. Unfortunately, plans sometimes go awry. With Jordan Williams deciding to take his talents to the NBA and Hawk Palsson returning to Europe to play professionally, as well as Alex Len's early season suspension, there was no choice but to throw Pankey into the fire.

He responded shockingly well in his first real game action, putting up a 13 and 6 line in the opener against UNCW and then posting 10 and 11 rebound games during the Terps' trip to Puerto Rico. Things soured pretty rapidly though. In a big early December win over Notre Dame, Mark Turgeon, never shy to make a point, played Pankey just 1 minute because of the player's attitude and demeanor, instead choosing to go small with Sean Mosley and Mike Parker as well as walk-on John Auslander.

In the immediate term, Pankey responded well, putting up 43 points over the team's next three games (the last three of Len's suspension), but questions about Pankey's drive and attitude continued throughout the season, and with Len available, Pankey's minutes and production waxed and waned as Turge was far more free to be judicious with his allocation of playing time across the board.

At the season's end, the raw numbers spoke favorably of Pankey. He was good on the boards (17.1/10.1 DR/OR) and as a shotblocker (2.8 block rate). He was also fairly efficient, if limited offensively, as unlike Padgett, he was not prone to trying to do too much with the ball in his hands.

Still, the questions lingered, and to some extent still do, as to whether Pankey would even be back next season given his hot and cold relationship with his coach and the influx of talent in the frontcourt beginning next year with Charles Mitchell and Shaq Cleare. That aside, it's important to remember that Pankey was still only a freshman this season, and from an on court perspective, showed plenty of potential. The likelihood that both Mitchell and Cleare can provide 15-25 minutes of ACC-caliber basketball in the frontcourt every night is slim next year so Pankey will have a role to play. If he can fulfill the potential he demonstrated this year, he can play a big role in making Maryland's frontcourt one of the deepest in the conference.

Mychal Parker set to transfer

This was supposed to be the first in a series about the seven returning player's from this season's Terps' team, but with today's news that Mychal Parker will be transferring at the end of the school year, it didn't make a ton of sense to break down the nuances of his game.

Parker wrote an exceedingly classy farewell letter to Terrapin Nation. Given that and how he always seemed to hustle while out on the court, it will be hard not to root for him wherever he ends up. The early schools mentioned included Loyola and UAB, both of whom have the former Maryland assistant connection with Rob Ehsan moving on from Virginia Tech this offseason.

Parker wraps up his career at Maryland with 3.4 points and 2.1 boards per game over 45 career games. His strength this year was in his rebounding as he was one of the best rebounding guards the Terps had seen in the past decade. He also shot very well at the FT line down the stretch, hitting 36 of 46 after starting off his career very poorly from the stripe.

Parker was also notable for his athleticism and his sporadic, but ridiculous, dunks. The athletic ability was never in question, but it was always a matter of whether the basketball skill will follow. Now he gets the opportunity to sit out a year and improve which should probably have happened last season, and when he does become eligible at his new school, he'll do so at a level where he could potentially put up big numbers in the scoring column.

The question now is what this says about the Terrapins going forward. Two weeks ago the team clearly had too much depth for next season in the backcourt with Parker still on board and Sam Cassell committing. Now with Parker gone and Cassell's status tenuous, the team will rely on five guys for the three backcourt spots, barring a late addition. Newcomers Seth Allen and Jake Layman seem like they'll get every shot to play right from the start of the season, and the team will need at least one to complement the three starters.

2008 Recruiting Retrospective

Season #2 has arrived. Some of you may call it the offseason, but that implies it's without excitement. For college basketball devotees like us, the coaching carousel, AAU and recruiting season, and the speculation about who's staying and who's going to the NBA hold almost as much intrigue as the season itself does. One other thing that happens during the second season is player movement via transfers. This seems to happen more and more now for a few reasons, both speculative and factual.

One driver would seem to be the player movement at the high school level. For a top level recruit, it seems unusual if the player hasn't been to more than one high school. Whether it's a guy transferring from his local public school to a local private school power, or it's the wandering nomad of high school hoops whose number of school matches or exceeds the 4 years of high school, players move around.

The second factor which we've seen more and more every year, is the graduate student loophole which allows a "student-athlete" who has graduated from his current institution with eligibility remaining to transfer to play immediately at another school, provided he does so to enroll in a graduate program not offered at his current school. That seems quite logical, but if you've followed this over the past couple of seasons, it's usually a way for bigger schools to poach a player from a school lower down the rungs.

Jeff Goodman on CBSSports puts together an annual transfer list these days which is incredibly comprehensive. His list already has over 200 names on it and will almost assuredly continue growing as the academic year comes to a close and the coaching carousel continues to spin.

All of this led me to take a look at the high school class of 2008 and ask the question: how many players are four year players? For those that don't finish those four years is it a transfer situation, a draft situation, or something else entirely? This would probably be even more interesting if I were able and willing to track which school(s) these players originally committed to and when, but that's a bit more work than necessary for now.

So let's take a look. I used the top 30 players at each position on Rivals' rankings (top 20 for Centers) and tracked how their college careers have gone. Here's the positional breakdown:

PG - 9 early entries, 4 transfers, 16 four-year players, 1 other

SG - 10 early entries, 10 transfers, 11 four-year players

SF - 5 early entries, 7 transfers, 16 four-year players, 2 other

PF - 10 early entries, 8 transfers, 9 four year players, 3 medical issues

C - 3 early entries, 8 transfers, 9 four year players

So in total, out of the 140 players in the class of 2008 we had the following breakdown:

37 early entries

37 transfers

60 four-year players

6 other

Early entries are anyone playing professional basketball right now whether it's a traditional 1 and done, a guy playing in Europe, or someone like Brandon Jennings who never made it to college, choosing to go to Italy instead. The other category has some guys who had to stop playing due to injury and a few guys who switched sports.

In the ACC the numbers were a little different:

9 early entries

9 transfers

18 four-year players

1 other

The league actually had an identical even split between transfers and early entries just like the first sample, but the number of four year players was half of the total pool as compared to the above where it was a bit lower (3/7).

Moral of the story: expect player movement. When a guy gets his jersey handed to him on Senior Night after playing for your favorite school for four years, he's the exception, not the rule.

The Crimson are In

We were mercifully spared a week of analysis about whether or not Harvard deserves an at-large thanks to Princeton going to Philly and beating Penn last night in the final game of the Ivy League season, giving Harvard sole claim to the league title and the corresponding at-large berth.

It's a big day for Championship week as the Big East Tournament has its second day, plus the start of the Big XII, Conference USA, and Pac-12 tournaments among others.

At the moment, with Harvard officially out of the at-large pool, we have 28 teams for 16 slots.

BIG EAST TOURNAMENT (Tues-Sat in New York)
*Format: You probably know by now, but all sixteen teams come to Madison Square Garden for an unwieldy five day, five round tournament littered with byes and double byes.

*TV: All 15 games will be on the ESPN family of networks with the title game in primetime on Saturday.

*At-Large Hopes: The Big East won't break its record of 11 bids from last season, but it very well could get 10. Seton Hall, UConn, West Virginia, South Florida, and Cincy all come into the tournament needing wins because of various holes in their resume. On the other hand, at this late stage, it's hard to construct a scenario where more than one of them miss the tournament so they key might not be so much to win as to avoid scarring damage. Seton Hall and UConn did that in the first round, with the Huskies than beating West Virginia in a huge matchup earlier today. Cincy actually got the double bye, but a loss could very well dip their RPI down to the 75 range. Seton Hall has a huge shot against Villanova tonight, and South Florida cannot afford a bad loss to Villanova in the night cap.

*Who to Watch: Syracuse is easily the class of the league and gets the benefit of two byes. Two of the other three schools who get to sit the first two nights would be hugely surprising winners. The best bet otherwise is the second seeded Marquette team led by Jae Crowder and Darrius Johnson-Odom. Look for Georgetown if you want a team that played today and has a shot. Their potential semifinal game against Syracuse could be especially bitter with the series possibly ending soon and the Orange squeaking out a win earlier this year in the Carrier Dome.

ATLANTIC TEN TOURNAMENT: (1st Round Tues at campus sites, QF/SF/Final Fri-Sat in Atlantic City)
*Format: Another example of doublespeak in a conference name, the A-10 invites its top 12 with Rhode Island and Fordham missing the field.

*TV: The rest of the tournament will be on the CBS family of networks with Sunday's championship on the flagship network at 1 and the rest on CBS Sports.

*At-Large Hopes: Plenty. Temple is in and Saint Louis looks to be a near lock. Xavier went from the top 10 to the bubble after their rumble in the Queen City with Cincy. St Joseph's is a fringe bubble team, and even UMass and Dayton could lay claim to an outside shot should they be able to win their next two games.

*Who to Watch: It's a wild tournament. The top two seeds are your favorites, but in reality any of the eight teams remaining have a non-trivial chance of winning the tournament. The good news for a team like UMass or Dayton is that they have two days to recover after winning what amounted to a play-in game yesterday meaning that, having won the extra game already, they're not likely to much more gassed than the teams with byes should they get to Sunday. In fact you could probably make an argument that the extra game will have kept them a bit sharper than their opening round opponents.

SOUTHLAND CONFERENCE TOURNAMENT (QF Wed, SF/Final Fri/Sat in Katy, TX)
*Format: Eight teams made it with Southeastern Louisiana, Central Arkansas, Texas State, and Texas A&M-CC left out.

*TV: The final is Saturday at 2PM on ESPN2.

*At-Large Hopes: This league is play-in fodder more often than anything else. The league has never gotten two bids and has one team advance to the round of 32 since 1985.

*Who to Watch: Texas-Arlington ripped through the league at 15-1 and will be the favorite. Lamar may well be the second best team. Their coach is named Pat Knight. You may remember him from such meltdowns as: last month's press conference and his brief tenure at Texas tech succeeding his father.

Dragons and Vols

Mid-American Conference Tournament (1st round Mon at higher seed, 2nd Rd/QF/SF/F Wed-Sat in Cleveland)
*TV: Final is Saturday at 8PM on ESPN2

*Format: All twelve conference teams make it to the tournament in a bit of a convoluted format. The bottom eight will play two games (Monday and Wednesday) to make it into the main bracket where they'll meet the 3rd and 4th seeds coming off double byes in the QF. For the second time this Championship Week we see a triple bye with Akron and Buffalo not playing until Sunday.

*At-Large Hopes: This league was a semi-regular multi-bid league back in the late '90s, but they haven't gotten two bids since 1999 despite coming close a few times. This year won't break the streak.

*Who to Watch: Almost anyone in the East, although Akron (beat Mississippi State) and Buffalo (beat Dayton) getting three helps them out quite a bit. This league doesn't seed according to its two divisions, which is a good thing considering Eastern Michigan won the West despite an overall 14-18 record. The last three champions were seeded 6, 9, and 5 so don't count out Kent State (beat West Virginia), Ohio, or Bowling Green (beat Temple), either.

Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Tournament (Tues-Sat in Winston-Salem)
*Format: All 13 teams in the newly expanded MEAC play, with the top three getting byes.

*TV: The championship is set for Saturday at 1PM on the U.

*At-Large Hopes: It's a success every year that this tournament's winner isn't relegated to Dayton.

*Who to Watch: Savannah State won the league crown in its first year in the circuit, just a few years removed from their 9-102 start in DI from 2002-2005. It's a pretty amazing turnaround. This is their first winning season against DI opponents and given that they languished in the even more obscure reaches of independent status for the past decade, this is the Tigers' first conference tournament and first shot at the Dance.


*********

Part of the story this weekend was how bubble-y mid-majors lost in their conference tournaments. Drexel made it to the CAA finals and now has a few more days to sweat to see whether they stay home or not, while things were even uglier for teams like Iona, Middle Tennessee, and Oral Roberts, all of whom probably wasted outstanding seasons with losses in the conference tournaments' semifinal round.

Drexel in particular is an odd case. It's tough to say that they don't live up to the standards of last year's VCU team, but their resume is just terribly barren. They split two games against the Rams, losing the important one, and also lost to Virginia and St Joseph's, putting them at 1-3 all season against teams in tournament contention. Their computer numbers are bad with an RPI of 66 and a 210 SOS. They simply played no one.

That having been said, they did go 27-6 from a conference that has proven itself when its borderline teams are selected as at-larges. The committee may say that makes no difference, but I have a hard time believing that they're impartial enough not to let that bias them. They may not seem deserving, but in the 68 team era of week bubbles and parity in college hoops, they don't stack up as being much more flawed than North Carolina State (0-8 vs top 50 teams) or Northwestern (1-10 vs the same).

Meanwhile the most interesting case may be Tennesse, which beat Vandy to close out the regular season as the number two seed in the SEC, albeit one that finished six games off of Kentucky's torrid pace. The Vols are just 17-13 with an RPI of 75, numbers typically associated with teams hoping to get an NIT bid, but they do have four top 50 wins this season and get credit for playing better after the late arrival of Jarnell Stokes. Some *ahem* prognosticators have them banging down the door, but I'm not sure I see that, even this season. Tennessee needs to win at least two in NOLA this weekend to have any chance, but realistically I'm not sure that's enough. The first game will be against Ole Miss or Auburn, so only a potential game against Vandy/Miss State in the semis does much good. Tennessee isn't lacking for wins, relatively speaking, but they sure do need to do a lot to overcome their wretched nonconference stretch of losses to Oakland, Pitt, Austin Peay, and Charleston.

An updated cut-line projection is coming up.

Lillard Time and other Assorted Fun

Three more tournaments kicked off this weekend:

BIG SKY TOURNAMENT (QF Saturdaay at higher seed, SF/Finals Tues/Wed at Montana)

*TV: The title game will be on ESPN2 at 9PM on Wed.

*Format: The top 6 teams advance with the Northerns (Arizona and Colorado) as well as Sacramento State staying home.

*At-Large Potential: Montana and Weber State have a chance to make noise once they win the tournament, but otherwise they'll settle for one of the consolation tournaments.

*Who to Watch: Montana and Weber State got the byes and are clearly the class of the league so it would be a major upset if they don't meet Wednesday night. The Grizzles have home court as the top seed, but Weber has Damian Lillard, one of the nation's best scorers, who could be this year's version of Harold "the Show" Arceneaux who helped Weber upset UNC back in the late 90s.

SUMMIT LEAGUE TOURNAMENT (Sat-Tues in Sioux Falls)

*TV: Finals are 9PM Tuesday on the duece.

*Format: Eight of the league's teams play. South Dakota was ineligible and IPFW and UMKC weren't QUITE good enough.

*At-Large Potential: None. Their last at-large was back in '91 when Green Bay made it with a shooter named Tony Bennett leading the way. Ugh.

*Who to Watch: Oral Roberts won the league by two games, but second seeded SD State is playing its home state and kenpom has them as the better team. They're the heavy favorites to be playing on national TV on Tuesday.

SUN BELT TOURNAMENT (Sat-Tues in Hot Springs):

*TV: The finals are Tuesday at 7 on ESPN2.

*Format: UL-Monroe was ineligible because of their APR, but otherwise all 11 teams go to Hot Springs.

*At-Large Potential: The Sun Belt is always one of those conferences teetering on the edge of getting more than one bid, especially with strong teams from Western Kentucky and South Alabama recently, but it's unusual that they break through. Middle Tennessee is a really good team which probably would have a chance if it had pulled off a win at Vandy last month, but as it is, it's win or go to the NIT for the Blue Raiders.

*Who to Watch: Denver would be the heavy favorite if MTSU gets knocked off and has an honest shot in the finals. UALR is actually the second seed with a nominal home court advantage in their home state, but they'd be hard pressed to pull off the upsets.