mdenny wrote:Are you going back 10 years or 20?
I love nerd mode. Probably best to start from 2016 and go backwards because some guys within the past 5 years still haven't reached potential - jury can still be out.
So from 2000 to 2016....spanning picks 44 to 48 (5 per year) is a sample size of 80 which is decent. I'm gonna guess no more than 10 guys who became rotation pieces at some point and no more than 5 guys who became starters. Maybe 2 guys who became significant players ie allstar or borderline allstar. Those are just hunches though.
I have to admit....it wasnt until tanking became an option last year that i started looking at previous draft lists. I honestly did not realize how hit and miss the nba draft is. There were far more names that were never significant in the nba than i was expecting.
I'm sure someone has calculated how many of the 60 draft picks per year are expected to be eventual rotation pieces (1 - 10 on a roster for at least one season). Would be interesting to see some data on that.
So for any given year....we can say there's 300 rotation spots in the nba. There's a certain amount of players that drop out of that list (retirement or injury or digression) and an equal amount that enter the list. I wonder what that number is? In other words....what's the average yearly turnover for nba rotations?
Establishing a running average of that turnover....then we'd have a sense of how many spots players are competing for. Since the draft pproduces 60 more competitors every year for that 300 list....it starts to make sense why so many names of previous drafts are unrecognizable.
Someone here posted a data analysis of drafting efficiency by team and i was really impressed by the math. The raptors under masai were #1 and the #2 spot was WAYYYY behind us in a cluster with the rest of the league. The distance between us and #2 was greater than any other sequential difference. One has to assume, after Banton, that this is more than luck at this point.
Edit: not sure if this is the same analysis but it's the same idea. One caveat: i was wrong about something. The distance between us and denver (#2 - both of masai's teams!) is lesser than the difference between #29 and memphis (#30).
It's still incredible how elite we have been at drafting:
https://towardsdatascience.com/measuring-success-in-the-nba-draft-a7f67cfb7718
This was the late night, C-rate version of nerd mode. I looked at 2014-2020 and it was very subjective.
Taking your suggestion to go back to 2000 we have the following:
2020 - 0
2019 - 2 (Talen Horton-Tucker, Terance Mann)
2018 - 2 (De'Anthony Melton, Svi Mykhailiuk)
2017 - 2 (Dillon Brooks, Sterling Brown)
2016 - 0
2015 - 1 (Norman Powell)
2014 - 2 (Dwight Powell, Jordan Clarkson)
2013 - 2 (Mike Muscala, Raul Neto)
2012 - 0
2011 - 0
2010 - 0
2009 - 1 (Danny Green)
2008 - 1 (Goran Dragic)
2007 - 1 (Marc Gasol)
2006 - 1 (Paul Millsap)
2005 - 1 (Lou Williams)
2004 - 0
2003 - 1 (Matt Bonner)
2002 - 1 (Matt Barnes)
2001 - 0
2000 - 1 (Brian Cardinal)
Obviously some of these are debatable. Brian Cardinal had two 'OK' years in the NBA according to the stats, but does he belong on the list? For recent years, guys have had promising starts but we don't know if they will ultimately have good NBA careers - I just included those guys I think are on track so far. Probably best as you said to not include these recent years.
It's interesting that this works out to around 1 in 5 for getting a roster player, which is higher than I expected. It's not as high if the criteria is a starter or impact player - using that you drop guys like Cardinal, Bonner, Muscala, Brown, etc.
It's good that others elsewhere have already done the detailed statistical analysis! I still find it interesting to do it this way because it puts familiar names into the discussion rather than simply numbers.
Anyway, that's probably my last one of these - I'm going to continue watching and enjoying Dalano Banton become a big part of the Raptors.
I have no idea how somebody with these skills makes it to pick 46. Even a guy like Norm who turned into a very good player wasn't teasing with these types of plays early in his rookie season.
