This is pretty inside baseball, as they say. But there's been some interest in the European League strength that I have been looking at as a part of my draft model building. So, I thought I'd share the latest work I have done on it.
I am only looking at the leagues tracked in the DraftExpress database, which covers the most of the major prospects that are drawing interest for this year's draft. Leagues tracked there are the transnational Euro League and Euro Cup, as well as the Spanish ACB, Italian, Adriatic, French and Greek leagues. That leaves the Turkish and Russian VTB out along with some less prominent leagues like the German, Polish and Belgian leagues.
The Euroleague and Euro Cup are the keys to being able to draw comparisons between leagues since teams and players will play in both the international and domestic leagues during the same season. That gives me a good number players facing competition in both.
Again the basic logic is that players facing more difficult level of competition will perform less efficiently than against less skiled or athletic players, which is pretty basic and not terribly controversial.
As I did in both the D-League/NCAA and D-League/Europe comparison I used the Alternative Win Score (AWS), a linear boxscore metric, to measure the player's relative performance in each league. Against inferior competition any player with be able to rack up better stats, score more efficiently, gather more rebounds, steals, and likely commit fewer fouls. When a group of players suffer a fall in production when changing leagues, as NCAA players do when playing pro in Europe then we can infer that they are facing tougher competition.
Below are the results of the median change in efficiency looking at players playing in both one of the domestic leagues and one of the larger leagues over the last two years by league.
| French-Eurocup | Adriatic-Eurocup | Greek-Eurocup | ACB-Eurocup | Italian-Eurocup |
| -0.57 | 0.25 | 0.1 | 1 | -0.1 |
| French-Euroleague | Adriatc-Euroleague | Greek-Euroleague | ACB-Euroleague | Italian-Euroleague |
| -1.5 | -1 | -1.85 | 0.34 | -0.2 |
| Euro Cup- Euro League Transitive |
Euro Cup- Euro League Transitive |
Euro Cup- Euro League Transitive |
Euro Cup- Euro League Transitive |
Euro Cup- Euro League Transitive |
| 0.93 | 1.25 | 1.95 | 0.66 | 0.1 |
To interpret that table a bit, the Adriatic, Greek, and Italian league are overall close to as competitve as the Eurocup league. While the the Spanish ACB is considerably more competitive and the French league is somewhat less so. On the Euroleague side, the results are mostly consistent with the ACB still more competitive than the Euroleague and the other leagues less so.
The interesting results are that the Greek teams playing in Euroleague appear to be facing a much bigger jump in competition level than those playing in the Eurocup. My impression is that the Greek league is one of the more imbalanced leagues in Europe with the Athens based Olympiacos and Panathinaikos being much stronger than much of the rest of the league. Consequently those two teams have easier Greek league schedules than the teams that have to face them. Just as the Pacers and Heat have the easiest schedules in the Eastern Conference.
In general the results seem to follow the change in point differentials teams see going from their domestic leagues to the international ones, which is again reassuring.
So, the point of all this from my perspective is to have something of a strength of schedule adjustment for my draft model. My starting point after all of this analysis for the draft model comparing European players to NCAA by league is below, remembering that my overall analysis of college players jumping straight to Europe indicated an overall fall in production of -2 AWS per 40.
| French-NCAA | Adriatic-NCAA | Greek-NCAA | ACB-NCAA | Italian-NCAA | Eurocup- NCAA |
Euroleague- NCAA |
| 1.5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
Statistically speaking are those significant numbers given that the standard deviation for top one hundred prospects is just over 2 AWS points per 40. On the other hand other than Clint Capela and Jusf Nurkic there is a gap in the production of European prospects playing against grown men and the ones playing in college. But we'll see how it shakes out as I get the full model tested.
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