Pelton also writes about the "lingering value of potential", how players' prep rankings follow them all the way to the NBA draft.
In general, prep recruiting rankings explain about half as much of the variation in where players are picked as their WARP projections (based on college performance and age), despite the fact they add nothing to the projections when determining a player's actual value (measured by WARP) in the NBA.
Said more plainly, teams put too much value on how prospects rated entering college. It's too early to tell whether Barnes, Muhammad and Rivers will be good draft picks, but so far they have performed in the NBA much like they did in college.