(February 12th) One of the primary criticisms of Thomas Sorber’s early season statistical profile was that it was largely recorded against weak competition. And Sorber’s numbers, after a month of high caliber Big East competition, among the hardest that any prospect will face, have “suffered”. And I put “suffered” in scare quotes because his OBPM is just as 99th percentile as it was in the non-conference, and his DBPM has gone from the 89th percentile all the way down to the 88th – a mere rounding error that is replicated across all of his entire profile.. In other words, the reality is that Sorber has been just as good against high level competition as he was against lower level competition, and that’s extremely encouraging to see.
Teams are going to ask, repeatedly, “How will he translate” of Sorber, and it seems clear to us that the answer should be that he will be just fine, because the higher competition level does not seem to bother him at all. This will be a small part of fixing the reputational issues that he has with teams, and it should be the bare minimum his representation works towards.
(January 6th) It is legitimately hard to write about profiles that are this good with any kind of dynamism, because every single facet of the game in which Sorber participates is elite. There are a few small changes like going from the 92nd percentile in rebounds to the 87th, and the turnover numbers have increased such that Sorber has gone from the 99th percentile in true turnover percentage to the 98th, but those are both meaninglessly small changes in the grand scheme of things.
We should probably point out that Sorber is denoted here as shooting 32.1% from three, despite the actual number being 16.7%. Because Sorber takes so few shots, most of what’s represented there is sample size stabilization, which pulls things towards the mean value when so little information is available. Realistically, NBA teams are probably going to look at Sorber’s current results from three as being those of a guy who isn’t projected to take threes without additional development. That said, with how Sorber’s played to date, he won’t need to.
(December 12th) Every statistic requires significant context. We try, as much as we can, to provide that context in this profile. We do things like giving percentile ranks of the statistic in question, and sample size stabilizing, and comparing to players at a similar position. The problem is that with all of the different directions that you can take the context in, if you only get to show a single graphic, you can miss major details. For example, Thomas Sorber’s profile compares him to all bigs. It looks utterly ridiculous how dominant he is compared to all bigs – he’s in the 90th+ percentile in basically every single category, with the only exceptions being that he doesn’t shoot the three much and that, because he touches the ball a lot, he turns it over a little, a fact that is dwarfed by his 99th percent true turnover percentage, which accounts for that fact.
Except Sorber is not just any big. He’s a freshman. Freshman, typically, don’t perform at the same level as upperclassmen. This makes sense – it takes time to mature physically and mentally, and players learn a ton in their first few years with a program, whether that’s an NBA program or an NCAA program. Sorber, without that maturation, is still dominating everyone.
Now, it’s still early in the season, and Georgetown’s schedule is going to get harder over the rest of the year. Sorber can by no means afford to rest on his laurels against defenses that are going to be hungrier and hungrier to shut him, and exactly him, down. But if what he has done so far persists through the rest of the season, it’s hard to put any kind of ceiling on how high a team might take him.