January Madness: Seeding the Top 68 College Basketball Players

LSU’s Ben Simmons would be the runaway No. 1 if March Madness seeded the top 68 players instead of teams.

He scored 36 points to stun a very good Vanderbilt team that has already faced the top Value Add team (Kansas) and the second best player in little-known Jameel Warney of Stony Point. Here is the players’ bracket based on Value Add ratings.

Frank Mason, Wayne Seldon, and Perry Ellis make Kansas one of only three teams (Oklahoma and Villanova are the other two) with three players ranked in the top 3% (top 120 of 4000 players).

If auto bids went to the Player of the Year in each conference, Warney would represent the American East. However, he has no problem against big time opponents, averaging 19 points, 11 rebounds, and four blocked shots in two games against Vanderbilt and Notre Dame. He also blocked eight shots in a win over a very good Princeton team.

(Explanation of system: Value Add measures with great precision how many points a player impacts his team’s score and the opponent’s score, and Simmons improves LSU by 16.21 points per 100 times LSU and their opponent possess the ball, and Warney is next best at 14.79. Because teams average possession the ball 70 times per game, the actual per game impact on the final score is 11.4 for Simmons and 10.4 for Warney, but the advanced process is explained here.)

Gary Payton of Oregon State and Kahlil Felder, who scored 37 points against Michigan State and 30 against Virginia in the past two weeks, would be the other 1-seeds in a tournament of players: