Dave Sez

Mid-Season Prouty Ratings

You may recall that at the end of the non-conference season (more or less), I calculated the Prouty ratings of every player in the league to see who had had the best start. (Click here for those ratings and for a definition of Prouty ratings).

Well, now that we are halfway through the conference season (Clemson and Miami have played nine games), I ran the numbers again. Ideally, I'd use statistics from conference games only. I think when you are comparing ACC players to each other, it shouldn't matter how they did against Western Nevada Tech and Southern West Virginia. Unfortunately, I can't find a good, handy site for conference-only games. If anyone knows of a good site for this data (and I'm not counting the official ACC site as "handy"), let me know in the comments.

When you look at the top players, they are the ones you'd expect. The league is loaded with stars this year, particularly on the top teams, and the top nine positions are filled with players from the big three schools, Duke, Carolina and Wake.

Chris Paul claims the top spot at the halfway point, which is exactly where I'd rank him for conference player of the year. I was a bit surprised to see Sean May at #2, as most people think of him as the #4 Heel so far this year, but he does have some fantastic numbers.

At the beginning of the conference season, do-it-all point forward Julius Hodge was the top-ranked player, but he's fallen to #12. That fall is due both to a drop off in his production and the recent troubles of his team as a whole. The next best Wolfpacker is Andrew Brackman at #41. You can see why they are struggling right now.

In part because Prouty takes the team's record into account, you don't get anyone from the bottom dwellers until Devin Smith of Virginia at 21 and Sharrod Ford of Clemson at 22. Ford is also hurt by his abysmal free throw percentage of 58.1%.

Here are the top 50 players:

For the full list, with all the stats, click here.