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The Case for Trading Draft Picks
The Knicks have a franchise player in Kristaps Porzingis. They need to be careful not to waste his prime playing years by avoiding trades for star talent at the cost of draft picks.
If you grew up in the Dolan Knicks era, you know nothing but losing. That losing is not exclusive to just basketball games. You have lost so much more than that. You have lost draft picks, and a lot of them at that. Being a Knicks fan in the Dolan era is to be a traumatized individual. A revolving door of executives have acted like assailants in the NBA night, chased away, but not before they could swipe any reason to clap from the Knicks’ faithful.
I get it, New York Knicks’ fans are protective of their draft picks. After being victimized time and time again, they have resorted to self-defense, an exercise practiced on Twitter and sports radio talk shows.
I’m here to tell you that trading draft picks is alright. Or, it can be alright.
Before I explain my rationale, it is important to mention this point: trades are like snowflakes in the fact that no two are exactly alike. An intelligent organization will use the lessons learned from peer trades to help understand the market and to understand how to package an offer together. They should not avoid making a move because an unrelated move, made several years ago by the same organization, didn’t work out. The Knicks traded draft picks for Eddy Curry in 2005. That was twelve years and multiple Collective Bargaining Agreements ago! That trade has no impact on the market for a player in 2017. So the argument that trading draft picks is a bad idea because the Knicks have done so before and it didn’t work out is not sound. A trade is made based on current market conditions. How much did Paul George’s price change over the last few months?
The market in July 2017 is offering up Kyrie Irving, a 25-year-old elite scoring point guard that is one season removed from hitting one of the biggest shots in NBA history. Kyrie serves as a vessel to reject the notion that trading draft picks is an irresponsible action.
The Knicks are sort of in a rebuild. They have missed the playoffs in four consecutive seasons, and it seems likely they will miss the postseason again this coming year, even in an Eastern Conference that is more watered down than a cocktail in a fancy restaurant.
But they have Kristaps Porzingis. But they have Kristaps Porzingis. Knicks fans can be heard muttering this truth silently to themselves in all five city boroughs.
By having a potential franchise player in Kristaps Porzingis, the Knicks can’t be in complete rebuild. They have two seasons remaining of KP on a friendly, team-controlled contract, before he becomes a restricted free agent. His free agency could make him very expensive; in the worst case, they have three seasons before he could become an unrestricted free agent and leave.
Drafting a franchise player is the hardest thing to do in the NBA. Phil Jackson, by the grace of Zen, was able to find Porzingis with the fourth overall pick in 2015. Two years of KP’s career have already been spent in turmoil. The Knicks cannot continue to waste away years of a franchise player by starting a long rebuild process. They might not need to be good tomorrow, but they need to start showing improvement soon, both to keep Kristaps from fleeing New York and to maximize his prime seasons.
When I said earlier that trading draft picks can be alright, this is what I mean: If the right player becomes available, and that player can maximize the prime playing years of your franchise player, the cost of draft picks might be acceptable.
Again, drafting a franchise player is the HARDEST thing to do in the NBA. When you get one, you better find a way to put a good team around him.
It seems the common thread among Knicks fans is woven with the idea that building a competitive team around Porzingis should be done by using future draft picks. Porzingis is only 21 years old (he’ll be 22 by the start of next season), the team is coming off a 31-win campaign, and Carmelo Anthony is presumably moving on to greener pastures. The team is not built to win now, so why acquire veteran pieces? Draft more young studs and let them develop alongside Porzingis, and together, they will become a future contender.
This logic is correct, until you start doing the math. The Knicks don’t have the luxury to wait for future draft picks to develop into elite talent to play with Porzingis. The clock is ticking. It takes a really long time for 18 year olds to become top players on contending teams, if they become top players at all.
There are eight teams that won at least 50 games last season. Looking at the three best players on each of those teams (using Value Over Replacement Player — VORP), none of the 24 players observed were younger than 24 years old last season. Each team had at least one of their star players in the thick of their prime (age 28):
If we project the Knicks roster ahead to 2020–21, when Kristaps would be 25 years old (and a potential free agent), and if we assume the Knicks keep Frank Ntilikina along with their 2018 and 2019 draft picks, we find a team that would have Porzingis and a trio of 20, 21, and 22 year olds. In other words, it is unlikely that any of the Knicks 2017, 2018, or 2019 draft picks would be ready to perform at a contending level by the time Porzingis is entering his prime-age seasons (age 25 and up).
When Kristaps Porzingis is ready to compete for a championship between the ages of 25–30, the Knicks’ future draft picks would still be in their developmental years until the tail end of that window.
The Knicks could speed up the process by trying to acquire a player like Kyrie Irving. The 25-year-old guard is already in his prime, with an upward trend fully possible. While his contract will be more expensive over the next two seasons than a rookie, his production will be far superior. Remember, rookies are cheap, but they start to get expensive (through qualifying offers and restricted free agency) around the time they are finally ready to compete at a championship level.
FiveThirtyEight projects the production of players over a five-year window. The Knicks fell to the eighth overall pick in the most recent draft, so let’s use a slightly higher pick to articulate the point. The fifth overall selection, De’Aaron Fox, projects to produce -0.3 wins above a replacement level player next season. Kyrie Irving projects to produce 5.6 wins. It is not until the 2022 season, five years from now, when Fox reaches his potential of about three wins per season. His ceiling never projects to be as high as Irving’s:
This is just one example, and projections could be wrong, but we know from history that players entering the league at 18 or 19 years of age take a while to reach their full potential. Last season, only three players age 22 or younger were in the top 30 of players with the most VORP — Giannis Antetokounmpo (22), Nikola Jokic (21), and Karl-Anthony Towns (21). Even the best young examples were as many as three years removed from their age-19 draft seasons. Notice none of them played for championship contending teams, and only one for a playoff team.
Trading draft picks for a player past his prime or an average player doesn’t make sense. And, yes, the Knicks have done this in the past, another mugging to the fans psyche. But trading draft picks to acquire a star player at the beginning of his prime offers great return. It almost guarantees a level of performance in the near future, and reduces a variety of risks associated with an unknown draft pick.
Three things need to happen for a draft pick to become a key piece on a contending team. First, the pick needs to fall in the right spot in the draft to find the right player (luck). Second, the team needs to be smart enough to draft the right player at their slot (scouting and luck). Third, the player needs time to develop (culture).
When fans talk about future draft picks, they often assume the three things listed above will automatically happen. They forget that even if a team is lucky enough to get the right draft pick and draft the right player, it takes time for that player to become a star. A star that has already hurdled those three obstacles becomes an expensive commodity.
The currency of draft picks is dynamic. Imagine a television costing $1200 and you have $1200 in your bank account, but that figure is converted from Euros. The exchange rate could impact how much money you actually have to spend by the time you decide to spend it. Draft picks are trade currency in foreign money. Since they don’t represent actual players in the league yet, their value isn’t simple to estimate.
If you could plot the value of a draft pick over time, beginning with the years preceding a draft and continuing on to include the drafted player’s career, the chart would probably look something like this:
A draft pick is also like a car. It is usually worth the most when it is new. The moment a team takes it off the proverbial lot by drafting a player, the asset’s value changes, and begins to depreciate in value rapidly. No longer is it an unspecified promise; it is a real basketball player. Just as easily, Jahlil Okafor could theoretically be Anthony Davis. Of course, there are exceptions. By realizing the draft pick is a superstar, like a Karl-Anthony Towns, the value of that asset goes up. It becomes like a vintage car, worth more than the original sales price.
In most cases, the value of a draft pick goes down after the draft. The third overall pick is worth a lot more in a trade than Enes Kanter (drafted 3rd overall in 2011) in the second year of his rookie contract (if traded in 2012). This is because teams are unwilling to trade unprotected lottery picks for just about anything except a current all-star in return (close your eyes Nets fans). And since 1990, only 27 percent of top ten picks have turned into All-Stars. That number is inflated by the fact that 65 percent of those star players were number one overall picks. If a team is drafting in the 6–10 range, only 16 percent suited up in multiple All-Star games.
Think about that. Teams are willing to trade a known All-Star (e.g. Kyrie Irving, Paul George) for a 16–27 percent chance to draft a future all-star who would probably take 3–4 years to become one. Or, just around the time this future player is ready to demand a trade or indicate they might not re-sign with that team in free-agency.
Flip that around and you can see why a team with a projected lottery pick has a better bargaining position before the draft than after it, when the laws of probability catch up to the actual player drafted.
In a sense, holding onto a draft pick is like playing Blackjack. A lottery pick is like starting with a 10. If a team wins the draft lottery, they are dealt an Ace, and it’s Blackjack. Any other lottery result is simply adding another card. The draft is taking a third card. Some teams get lucky and end up finding their way to 21 by selecting the best player. Others completely miss, drawing another ten on a 14. The smart teams know when to fold and when to hit.
The Knicks are holding an Ace in Kristaps Porzingis. With a young star player like Kyrie Irving on the trade market, they have a decision to make. Do they keep their draft picks, hoping to buck the trend and find All-Stars who they can develop quickly enough to be legitimate sidekicks to Porzingis in his prime playing years? Or do they trade some of those draft picks, while their value is most consistent, before the draft, to acquire a known commodity who is ready to produce at an all-star level with Kristaps for the immediate years to come?
Trading draft picks is alright. Or, it can be alright. As long as they are traded in the right deal.
— Jeffrey Bellone, columnist
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