Despite more resources, scouting still a leap of faith

	You may not know much about Torrell Martin, but scouts have gathered plenty of information about his NBA potential. AP

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Final Four weekend may mark the end of the college hoops season, but it also opens the campaign for an even bigger prize for those in the college ranks: the NBA contract that comes with being drafted in June.

Starting with next week's Portsmouth Invitational through the Pre-Draft Camp and private workouts, NBA scouts and general managers will spend the next three months trying to confirm what they already have seen or convincing themselves that what they've seen is far from the finished product.

Few venues offer a better glimpse of a player's ability than the NCAA tournament, which tests a player against the country's best talent under national scrutiny. But the three-week crucible that is the NCAAs doesn't offer quite the same view of the next generation of pros that it did when a single grainy black-and-white film convinced the Virginia Squires that a kid named Julius Erving was worth drafting.

In speaking with an NBA scout, SI.com was able to ascertain how scouting the tournament -- and college basketball -- has changed.

Resources

Gone are the days when a single GM was responsible for scouting, interviewing and investigating as many prospects as time allowed. With brigades of scouts and consultants, and equally sizable budgets, clubs now have much greater reach. Game tapes, in-person scouting reports and phone conversations with friends and coaches all form a catalog of information on players from the top of the draft to the back end of the second round.

Just as important are the volumes of video now available on any player of interest. Even a prospect such as Torrell Martin from a school as small as Winthrop has a stack of videotapes from the school's two NCAA tournament appearances and a handful of nonconference games.

"When Joe Dumars played at McNeese State, how many tapes do you think [teams] had on him?" asked our scout.

Predicting the future

The exodus of players before they've used their full eligibility and the expansion of Division I programs have made scouting as much an effort in projection as it is analysis.

The Greg Odens and Kevin Durants of the NCAA may play before a national audience against top competition almost every night, but, should they bolt after their freshman seasons, as many predict, an NBA team will have fewer than 40 games to assess their futures. Compare that to the 80-plus-game careers Elvin Hayes or Lew Alcindor got to make an impression.

So while technology and resources make more information available on a player than ever before, the brevity of some of those players' college experience limits what a team can learn. Will they get stronger? More agile? A better jump shot? Not all of those questions are likely to be answered in a single season.