Thanks for putting this together, 81! One amendment: I think ESPN had Pedersen at no. 4.
It will be really interesting to see what our team is like in two years' time, given that the raw talent is largely collected in the younger half of our team.
One other thought: do we think the expansion of the WNBA and the increasing prominence of women's pro basketball overseas affects things? At the margins, I think the more likely it is that a top recruit thinks she could make a career out of basketball (playing, coaching, commentating, etc.), the less likely she is to be swayed by the "40 year decision" pitch. I think that's part of why we have a really hard time landing top recruits in MBB - even if they could get admitted, the top ones have such high prospects in the NBA that they might not care as much about the benefits of Stanford, and they're unlikely to stay long enough to graduate anyway. Someone like KLS, for example, can probably craft a career entirely around basketball, so the tradeoff in going to UConn might not be much of one at all?
It will be really interesting to see what our team is like in two years' time, given that the raw talent is largely collected in the younger half of our team.
One other thought: do we think the expansion of the WNBA and the increasing prominence of women's pro basketball overseas affects things? At the margins, I think the more likely it is that a top recruit thinks she could make a career out of basketball (playing, coaching, commentating, etc.), the less likely she is to be swayed by the "40 year decision" pitch. I think that's part of why we have a really hard time landing top recruits in MBB - even if they could get admitted, the top ones have such high prospects in the NBA that they might not care as much about the benefits of Stanford, and they're unlikely to stay long enough to graduate anyway. Someone like KLS, for example, can probably craft a career entirely around basketball, so the tradeoff in going to UConn might not be much of one at all?