Best drafting front office?
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 9:32 am
Who is the best drafting front office? I'll go with the Spurs. Despite B.Wright's role in the last few years, it's functionally been the same core front office run with Buford and Pop at the center for decades now, and their draft record over that time speaks for itself.
My methodology for rating draft picks is pretty straight forward. If the draft were done again in hindsight, where would the guy you picked have gone? That's the fairest baseline for assessing picks, not "yeh, but Jokic was the next pick, so your 2nd round pick sucked". Looking at the Spurs record is pretty impressive. I'll exclude 2020 on onwards because it's too early, though I like both Vassell and Primo, but Keldon/White/Dejounte went 29th and it looks like they'd have gone top 5-10 in a redraft. Kawhi went 15th and should have gone #1. George Hill would have been a 7-10 lotto pick on a redraft despite going in the late 20s in actuality. Lonny Walker has shown promise but it's wait and see with him still. Samanic is TBD still. There's a bunch of solid role players they got too; Bertans (42), CoJo (29), SlowMo (30), Tiago (28). Only a few real misses, and some of those are tempered by the context. Livio got hurt and lost his explosion, taking away what made him a viable NBA player. Milutinov was picked as a stash to assure the team they had the cap to get LMA and keep Duncan, which led to a 67 win team the next year. As it turned out they didn't need to pick a stash, but they didn't know that the cap would be much higher than projected when they did that and they had to clear all the cap they could. Sensible move tbh. We'll see if Samanic ends up as a bust, it's still too early.
My methodology for rating draft picks is pretty straight forward. If the draft were done again in hindsight, where would the guy you picked have gone? That's the fairest baseline for assessing picks, not "yeh, but Jokic was the next pick, so your 2nd round pick sucked". Looking at the Spurs record is pretty impressive. I'll exclude 2020 on onwards because it's too early, though I like both Vassell and Primo, but Keldon/White/Dejounte went 29th and it looks like they'd have gone top 5-10 in a redraft. Kawhi went 15th and should have gone #1. George Hill would have been a 7-10 lotto pick on a redraft despite going in the late 20s in actuality. Lonny Walker has shown promise but it's wait and see with him still. Samanic is TBD still. There's a bunch of solid role players they got too; Bertans (42), CoJo (29), SlowMo (30), Tiago (28). Only a few real misses, and some of those are tempered by the context. Livio got hurt and lost his explosion, taking away what made him a viable NBA player. Milutinov was picked as a stash to assure the team they had the cap to get LMA and keep Duncan, which led to a 67 win team the next year. As it turned out they didn't need to pick a stash, but they didn't know that the cap would be much higher than projected when they did that and they had to clear all the cap they could. Sensible move tbh. We'll see if Samanic ends up as a bust, it's still too early.
