With conference tournaments in full swing and the NCAA tournament a week away, it's time to take a first look at my WARP projections for the college prospects who could be in this year's NBA draft.
As always, my projections are built on three factors:
The player's projected performance as a rookie, based on translated NCAA stats over the past three seasons, adjusted for strength of schedule and a factor regressing outlier performance to the mean;
The player's age;
Where the player ranks in the latest top 100 rankings from my Insider colleagues Jonathan Givony and Mike Schmitz.
(For more on how the projections work and a look back at past projections, see here.)
Even without factoring in international prospects, most notably Luka Doncic and his historic production in EuroLeague, this looks like a strong crop at the top. There's an unusual amount of agreement between my stats-only projections (factoring in translated production and age) and this year's top 100. Still, there are some surprising names in my top 30 and the order isn't quite the same as our top 100, starting at the very top.
