With location we are going to examine the shot selection and then the flip the switch to where these AAU players are from and the correlation with high school success rates.

Here is the examination of shots attempted in the latest AAU State tournament by amount and percentages. First off Inside attempts are primarily lay ups, put backs, and perhaps a stray post up.

The 4th grade had the most attempts inside of any class by amount and percent. After that the trend lines drop for the winners, but slightly increase for the second place finishers. The lowest inside attempt percent went on the winners side went to grades 7 and 9.

Next comes shots from behind the arc.

Here the trend line goes up. What is interesting to note is the losing team attempted more 3s than the winners starting in sixth grade and the gap kept getting larger.

In the attempt side the 8, 10 and 11 winner were clearly lower. There was a huge swing between 8 and 9 winners. 7 & 9 took a higher percent of their shots from deep than did 10 & 11.  If the losing team attempted more 3s as a % of shots, they were 0-5.

Is there a difference in ages? Here are the attempts of the 4th and 11th grade state champs.

Disregard the larger graphic for the grade 4 winners. What is important is the shot location differences once a team gets older. Much of the damage done by younger teams can be directly tied to the physical: being more aggressive and developmentally bigger/stronger/faster.  They score at will with steals against smaller players that struggle with ball control and dominate the offensive glass. A full 78% of shots are within six feet of the basket. When players get older that number declines to a healthy 65%. Where do the missing shots go? to the 3 point line which more than doubles from 10% to 22% of all shots attempted by the winning teams.  Mid range shots were relatively flat.

Getting back to the younger teams: As teams get older they find the success they enjoyed when younger has disappeared. Other teams catch up physically and with their skills. Many older ex-champions falter at this point. The 2019 champions didn’t hit their stride until sophomore year. The runners-up ruled the state in sixth and seventh grade, but never really improved on their mark after that.

Here is the breakdown of AAU players by class.

Over half the players playing in club ball come from 4A teams. Add in the 3A players and  an overwhelming amount (73%) are from big schools. Due to the geographical nature of Minnesota, the Twin Cities is the epicenter of club locations. The outlying areas struggle with distance, time, costs associated with playing on competitive club teams. The  other numbers for 2A and 1A can be skewed even lower when we eliminate metro based kids.

As for what schools are poised for March 2019 in the lower divisions?
1A: Mountain Iron-Buhl (surprise!) with 7; Menahga with 6. No one else had more than three. Here is a preliminary look at 2019 by section
1 Grand Meadow
2 Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s
3 Minneota
4 Heritage Christian
5 Menahga
6 Ada-Borup
7 Mountain Iron-Buhl
8  Red Lake

2A

There are some notable absences from the club scene at this level. I only counted one player from Eden Valley-Watkins. Schools with more than four players include:
1 Stewartville
2 Norwood-Young America
3  Eden Valley-Watkins
4 Minnehaha
5 Minneapolis North
6 Sauk Centre
7 Proctor
8 Roseau

Here is the breakdown of AAU players by conference

Here you see why the Lake is so powerful. It sends 16.8 players per school to AAU events with four teams in the top five slots.  The next best conference is the South Suburban at 9.2. The Lake’s numbers almost perfectly dovetail with the pp100 of the 2018 high school season. I included the Suburban East with Stillwater and without Stillwater.  You can see the Stillwater effect is a difference of 12.

The one conference that outperformed is the Mississippi 8. They were only one of four conferences to top the low bar of 80 pp100, but their numbers of players in club ball is slightly under six per school, one of the three lowest. The big outstate conferences of the Big 9 and Central Lakes don’t send a lot to the club scene perhaps due to distance and associated costs.

These numbers are only for grad classes 2019, 2020, and 2021.  This is the Quantity phase. We examined the Quality phase in an earlier post.

Two of the schools have yet to make a state tournament appearance: Mahtomedi and Farmington. Mahtomedi may come as a surprise considering they just graduated Emma Grothaus, Annika Saugstad and Eve Farrell.

The other schools are a list of regular suspects to be playing in mid March.

Wayzata 25

Prior Lake 20

Minnetonka 19

Hopkins 17

Centennial , Eden Prairie, Lakeville North, Mahtomedi 15

Roseville 14

Maple Grove 13

Cooper, Rochester Mayo 12

Farmington , Forest Lake, Northfield 11

Andover, Park Center, Rogers, St. Louis Park  10

 

The next posting will deal with time across the years for the 2019 class.

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