What Are the Odds to Become an All-Star for Each Draft Pick?
As of August 2020, the NBA season has not concluded due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the NBA Draft Lottery results are just determined and barring any issues the NBA Draft will take place on October 16, when the new season would start in normal conditions.
In this post, I have tried to investigate the draft picks and their relation to All Star selections, in which we can assess which pick will have more chance to be successful in terms of making a prestigious tag along their names.
For this project, I collected all data for NBA Drafts from 1989, the time the NBA Draft had started to consist of 2 rounds, until 2019. I also added a flag to each drafted player if they were selected for All-Star Game. It is worth to say assessing players with their All-Star selection is not the most ideal way to do it but this is the least I can do in order to understand the basics of draft pick evaluation and give a sense to you, as well.
The below graph represents the probability of a given draft pick to become an All-Star, which is populated from the last 30 years of draft results and All-Star selections. The blue line is the smoothed probability given from a logistic regression.
The obvious thing is the first pick would get the best chance to become an All-Star at some point of their career since it has a probability of 63.3% if we take last 30 years into account. When we move down, the interesting part is the 3rd pick has bigger chance to become an All-Star than the 2nd pick, based on last 30 years of data. To elaborate:
- 17 of 30 players(56.7%) have been named as All-Star for the 3rd pick.
- 12 of 30 players(40.0%) have been named as All-Star for the 2nd pick.
For the lottery picks, 2 of 14 picks had the worst luck for making the All-Star game in someday. In last 30 years, both 8th pick and 12th pick had only 1 player out of 30 players from their respective spots and the most recent was selected in 1993:
- 8th Pick: Vin Baker, MIL, 1993
- 12th Pick: Mookie Blaylock, NJN, 1989
Other than top-3 picks, there were two other spots which had double-digit number of players selected as All-Stars in the last 30 years: 4th and 9th picks with 10 All-Stars each(probability of 33.3%).
When we exclude the lottery, the probability of being an All-Star would be significantly lower than lottery picks. For the sake of simplicity, I tagged first 14 picks for lottery picks and the left the rest of them(from the 1st round) as non-lottery picks. It is a very rough estimation but I think there is fair to draw general conclusions to understand some of the basic trends of draft.
- Lottery Picks(1–14) → 108/420 = 25.7% probability of All-Star
- Non Lottery Picks(1st Rd) → 35/449 = 7.8% probability of All-Star
- Non Lottery Picks(All) → 57/1322 = 4.3% probability of All-Star
Additionally, there were two spots from the first round, which have not been identified with an All-Star player yet: 22nd and 23rd picks. Out of 30 players, these two spots are the only spots remains without an All-Star player.
When we go into the 2nd round, the picks and results are dicier. Just 22 players from the 2nd round have been named as All-Star in their careers, which means there was only 2.5% of chance for this feat, as it can been from the above graph.
Being an All-Star is not the most optimum way to assess the draft selection or player in general. Depending on the context, teams can pick whoever they seem fit for their existing lineup and he may help them to challenge for the NBA title for several years without being selected as All-Star.
As my friend Thomas mentioned in here, NBA is a league built around stars and maximizing the value of a draft pick is a priority for almost all of teams in the league since every team is dreaming of the player they took might become a franchise altering talent in someday. It should be stated the probability of getting a player in this caliber is not in favor for most of the teams though.
