Very cool stuff by Jason Gurney of BallHype….using Basketball-Reference.com, Yahoo and Google Maps, he was able to plot the birthplace of every NBA player.

Henry Abbott of TrueHoop was shocked that the distribution of players, team by team, was heavily concentrated east of the Mississippi River.

But as Jason points out, this kinda makes sense when you factor in the US population density.

But it got me thinking, what US States are the best at producing basketball talent? I crunched some numbers to see how states would rank in NBA players per capita. I had a theory/feeling that Mississippi would rank highly. Spending time there in my life, I’ve been fully aware of the talent Mississippi has produced…especially those players such as Jonathan Bender, Monta Ellis and Travis Outlaw who had committed to Mississippi State University but spurned the Bulldogs for the NBA Draft….pre-1-year rule.

Currently, there are 10 players that Jason has listed from Mississippi:

1. Ronald Dupree
2. Al Jefferson
3. Antonio McDyess
4. Lindsey Hunter
5. Mo Williams
6. Erick Dampier
7. Monta Ellis
8. Othella Harrington
9. Travis Outlaw
10. Earl Barron

And remember Jonathan Bender‘s career unfortunately ended early in 2006 due to chronic knee pain. Also remember that he was the one who broke Michael Jordan’s scoring record in the McDonald’s All-American game, scoring 31 in 1999. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.

In my opinion, the greatest player to ever come out of Mississippi was Chris Jackson AKA Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. He was from Gulport, MS, but went to Louisiana State University. When I was 8-9 years old, my dad and I had season tickets to LSU Basketball…and yes, those teams included Shaq O’Neal and Stanley Roberts.

Jackson’s NBA career could be considered rather tragic. The tourettes syndrome he had to deal with in his life was both part of the reason he was such a great basketball player (legend had it that he could not leave his backyard court unless he made 500 straight free-throws, or something like that), and perhaps the reason for his downfall (the medication affected his game, but if he didn’t take it, he would twitch uncontrollably). But Chris Jackson’s story is for another time, another place, and another blog post.

On to today’s numbers (and I’m hoping that I got all of them correctly from Jason’s work) — DC is first in per capita, or fewest residents per NBA player produced. But I live in DC, and the last time I checked, it was not a state (but they sure like to make us pay those Federal taxes) .

The first state? None other than Mississippi. Food for thought.