dougthonus wrote:
Yes, I am suggesting that every team in the league has a valuation chart of how valuable a draft pick is. I mean it's actually famous in the NFL. It's a bit harder to correlate in the NBA to present players, but teams know on aggregate what the expected return on a draft choice is if it is used by themselves or used in a future trade.
Football is a lot closer to baseball than basketball is, cause guys mostly have pretty isolated jobs and impact relative to basketball IMO. And I don't disagree that NBA teams probably have a model to help guide them on trades involving pick value. I just don't believe that they actually rely on those very much. In the NFL, it seems a lot more common to have "basket of picks" for "basket of picks" trades. In the NBA, that seems very rare, where most trades involving picks also involve usually multiple current players also.
1: Of course not every GM or team will value a pick the same way, but I can guarantee you they all have some type of thought of how much they are worth to them.
2: Of course situations vary between teams, that's why one team is a buyer and one team is a seller, but teams have an idea what they should get if they are buying or selling.
3: Of course the value of a pick isn't completely static and the closer you are to the draft and the greater feeling you have about the draft, the more precise that value can become to you, but when you are trading out (often multiple years in the future), it's pretty easy to apply a math formula and say the expected value is X, then upside is Y, the downside is Z, and figure out what you think the aggregate value is to you. Various GMs are certainly going to have different views based on their own stability, risk tolerance, team needs etc...
No real disagreement here. They absolutely should and do have "some type of thought" on how valuable picks will be to them.
That really isn't all we know. We know on average how good a player you will get roughly based on where you are in the draft. NBA teams do have entire data analytics departments, and they absolutely have valuations on draft picks based on modeling.
Disagree. We don't know in average how good of a player you get, because we don't have any metric to rank the value of individual players in a way that ANYONE relies on in more than a cherry picking way. Again, it's just a self check for them, a way to balance and check their holistic evaluation. When they see that their metric of choice supports their subjective holistic evaluation, they feel good and proceed. When it doesn't, they may pause, or they may say "well the metric isn't perfect, it's off in this case, I'm going ahead with it". My thought is that the metric is meaningless unless they follow it pretty strictly whether it aligns with their subjective eval or not. Yeah there are analytics departments that advise the decision makers, who then do whatever they think is best. As an engineer I'm a huge believer in analytics, I just wildly favor the micro ones that tell you something really accurate about something really narrow, not the ones that tell you something with huge error bars about something too complex to measure.
You mean your justification where:
1: You use vague meaningless metrics like "good playing careers" which you don't define.
I defined it pretty clearly - please re-read.
2: Where you made up the numbers and didn't actually research any of them
These are not things I made up. I've looked over many years of the draft many times, and IIRC the absolute max number of genuine good long term players I've ever seen in one draft was 7 or 8, and more commonly it's like 5.
3: Made up a nonsensical theoretical that does not match reality (ie, draft picks are risk propositions that you can never know perfectly the value of in advance, and thus they will never go in order)
Not sure what you mean by this. All I was saying is that in the limit, long term, the average quality of players will perfectly match draft order.
4: Your number of good players is ridiculously off. Let's say an average team has 8 rotation players (240 in the league). Let's say an average rotation player has a 15 year career (I can tell you that's way more than the reality, but trying to keep it simple). That means that every year 16 rotation players enter the league and 16 leave on average.
As you note, 15 years is wildly longer than almost any player is good for, but that's just the tip of the iceberg here. Why on earth is an 8th man for the worst team in the league a guy that "most teams would be quite happy to sign to multiple long term contracts and play a significant playing time role as an important part of a good team for the long term."?????? Or even, franky, the 8th man for the BEST team in the league? I'm just in awe of your perspective here. Why are "rotation players" all being defined as good? Off the cuff, I'd say it's more like at any given point in time, there are maybe 100 - 150 players max that are "good" (a really good team might have like 5, a really bad team might only have one), and those guys are good for maybe 8 years each on average. So their team(s) would be happy signing them to maybe three successive 4 year deals (in order to get the average of 8 years of outright good play). The idea that more than half of the league's players are "good", and are good for 15 years(!!!!) is just so far out there. I know you don't believe that. Good means good, it doesn't mean "present".
Now a lot of teams run more than 8 rotation players so the pool is actually larger, and the typical rotation player career used to be closer to 10 years, but it feels longer to me now, so I tossed out 15 so it wasn't arguable. The reality is that probably the typical draft yields 20+ rotation players.
Due to CBA realities, it's simply unwise for teams to sign their entire rotation to multiple consecutive long term contracts. It prevents them from being a good team.
When talking explicitly about the guys we mentioned Coby / Ayo, those are rotation players. They aren't stars or needle movers. You are quite likely to get a rotation player at pick #20. If you were to average VORP, BPM, and WS (I used these 3 things because they are on the basketball-reference draft page), then the average of those numbers for Coby is probably late teens and for Ayo early 20s). Ie, relative to their own draft classes, by those numbers, they are probably worth picks around those numbers based on those metrics. Granted, not trying to say that's the be all end all, but they aren't particularly special.
Those metrics also say Jarrell Brantley is better than Coby White. Don't worry, I never heard of him either lol.
At #20, sure, a player is likely to be a rotation player........ For maybe 1-3 years. His non-special team will then conclude he isn't the answer to any important question, and move on. They'll use four or five different 20th best players in their drafts as a rotation guy over the same time period that one 7th best guy is a "rotation player" for a good team. I guess I just think there is way more of a sliding scale on player quality than you do. And if guys aren't needle movers, why on earth would a team want to commit to them long term? Like, do you really believe that Coby white is actually no better than the 20th best player in his draft (or an average draft)? Bulls have had maybe 4 guys ever drafted that late in the modern era that were better than him - Jimmy, Taj, and maybe another guy or two (hard to rank Kukoc and Niko as draft and stash guys and maybe I'm forgetting someone). Meanwhile, he's been as good or better than like half the guys they draft even higher than him at #7. I would very roughly say he's approximately equal to the 7th best player in an average draft, which is really pushing the limit on what I call a "good career player". He could go both ways still. If I had to bet, as much as I love Coby, I'd say he won't be. Still has a chance though. Waaaay larger of a chance than an average #20 pick, which is a very, very small chance, and instead likely another Dalen Terry, Jason Caffey level nobody. What would be super interesting would be to find data on average career length and minutes played per draft position (or rather, again, average rank order per draft class).
