Expectations For the NBA Draft
Empirically Evaluating the Draft
Teams and fans, particularly those who’s teams have tanked their season in hopes a few ping pong balls bounce their way, have been awaiting Thursday night’s draft for months. However, if your team is thirsting for more than a little pick-me-up from one of these youngsters, don’t hold your breath. The draft is not an exact science by any means. It is difficult, even for the most experienced scouts and front offices, to successfully project a prospect’s future NBA talent after watching many of them play just a small sample size of games.
By Friday morning, after the draft, the Internet will be full of draft report cards, winners and losers, and the biggest steals. But how can we know so early? Rookies, especially the ones of the one-and-down era still have major holes in their game. Draft picks, particularly early picks, are longer term investments, thus, we cannot truly assess the value of the draft pick until several years into a player’s career.
In order to adequately evaluate the picks of recent NBA history it is necessary, then, to look retroactively at a prospect’s first few years in the NBA and see what value they bring compared to what we could expect from a similar pick in the draft. In doing so we can analyze which draftees were actually booms and busts, and which teams have been most successful in recent draft history.
To further understand the value teams can expect from every pick, 1 through 60, a linear regression model illustrates the expected total win shares[i] 5 years into a player’s career, using the 2000 to 2011 drafts. Modeling the average value of each pick enables an understanding of the variability within the draft and the decrease in expected value the deeper a draft progresses.
Booms and Busts
With a baseline of the success of past draftees we can then evaluate whether each fresh, young player out-performed or under-performed what a franchise could project to harness from their new investment. Using outlier detection the draft day steals and the major busts become apparent through all the muck of over-zealous draft reviews.
These outliers confirm the much-discussed failures of Adam Morrison, Kwame Brown, and the injury riddled career of Greg Oden. But remember Nikoloz Tskitishvili and Marcu Fizer? Yeah, probably not, because their less than mediocre play is incomparable for top 5 picks. Though not quite outliers, other draft failures have had differing stories. Andrea Bargnani, a number 1 pick in 2006, never fully lived up to his potential as a first overall pick. Jay Williams, number 2 in 2002, sustained a career ending off-court injury. And Shaun Livingston, a number 4 pick in 2004 out of high school, took longer to find his niche in the NBA, bouncing around the league until helping the Golden State Warriors to the 2015 title.
Yet what teams are truly yearning for with their draftees are players who not only produce well during their career but also give them more value than they could ultimately expect from their draft position. There is a laundry list of players who out performed their expected value by a large enough difference to be given the label, so liberally given out in the Internet age, of a steal. These are the diamonds in the rough. LeBron is a steal in the sense that he gave Cleveland, in his first 5 years in the league, more than they could’ve imagined for a number 1 pick, but so is a player such as Paul Milsap, drafted 47th in 2006 by Utah — an unexpected All-Star found late in the 2nd round. Yet, it is necessary to keep in context that the 10th pick in one draft may be far different than another. Some years are rich with talent, and some diluted with players who would’ve fallen even further in years flowing with skill.
Part of the excitement of Thursday’s draft is that a number of struggling franchises have hopes of finding the one player who will change the evolution of their franchise for the better — hitting the lottery in its definition. Since 2000, who are the players who have produced enough early in their careers to provide the value their GM’s crossed their fingers for and provided value not expected from their draft position? Just 18 players in 12 draft years fit this star category[ii]. Some of the league’s top superstars over the past decade litter this group, including 7 of the last 8 MVP’s in Stephen Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant. But not only are there top 10 picks included in this list, but a few guys that were passed up by a number of organizations. Marc Gasol, a 48th pick, produced an astounding 38.5 win shares over his expected value, falling short only to Chris Paul’s quick rise to one of the league’s most dominant point guards.
The draft is exciting and important for the future of many teams, but we have to take a step back to fully evaluate how it turned out. Looking at what players flopped and which ones were steals only to become the face of the league, is an intriguing topic, but, as I will do later this week, we must analyze the record of individual teams and general managers to evaluate the draft to the fullest extent. The draft may conclude neatly with the 60th pick Thursday night, yet its evaluation will continue for many years. The draft makes for great television, but an even greater discussion years later.
[i] Though I have never been the fondest of “kitchen-sink” statistics, like Win Shares, that try to use top-down measures to equate a player’s value to one single number, they can be beneficial in categorizing players to wide, general categories as long as we understand the limitations of the statistic.
[ii] Detection of outliers for both total Win Shares and Win Share differential based on the linear regression model.
