RealGM

Looking at the first 5 drafts of the 21st century, who were the THREE biggest steals and THREE biggest flops of each draft? Consider not only the NBA career of the player, but also WHERE in the draft he was taken (e.g. a "good" career at the #1 or #2 pick is basically expected [may even be disappointing; but a good career at something like #45 overall pick is a steal).

I'll start (off the cuff picks, though I'm going to try and rank them 1st to 3rd)....

2000 Draft
Best Steals
1st - Has to be Michael Redd, considering he was the 43rd overall pick [of 58].
2nd - Hedu Turkoglu?? There weren't a ton of shockers [outside of Redd] in this one. Turkoglu at #16 is probably the next best.
3rd - idk.....maybe Jamal Crawford at #8? Or Jamaal Magloire at #19?

Biggest Flops
1st - Marcus Fizer at #4. Funny story: I predicted he was going to be like Karl Malone 2.0 [if he could stay healthy]. Holy cow did I miss the mark on the one!
2nd - DerMarr Johnson at #6.
3rd - Either Darius Miles at #3 or Stromile Swift at #2. Plenty to pick from; basically five of the first eight picks in this draft were undeniably flops.


2001 Draft
Best Steals
1st - Tony Parker at #28. HOF career that was only barely taken in the 1st round.
2nd - Gilbert Arenas at #31. Helluva career for an early 2nd-rounder.
3rd - Going with Mehmut Okur at #38. Not a great player, obviously, but he had a solid career of OK(ish) length......which is more than you'd generally expect from the 38th overall pick.
The other one I strongly considered was Zach Randolph at #19. I get the feeling views of him are a little polarized, but I think everyone must concede that's an awfully good career for someone who went in the back-half of the 1st round. A better career than Okur, imo, but didn't go with him because he was a whopping 19 picks earlier in the draft.
And another potential feels like Gerald Wallace at #25. (Joe Johnson at #10 and Richard Jefferson at #13 are decent finds, too).

Biggest Flops
1st - Probably gotta go with Kwame Brown at #1, right? Feel like Jordan is a little to blame, but Kwame was a hugely disappointing #1.
2nd - Rodney White at #9.
3rd - Kirk Haston at #16. Played 27 total games (metrics look like a total scrub).
I feel like these three could be re-ordered somewhat.


2002 Draft
Best Steals
1st - Carlos Boozer at #35. Weak defender, but averaged pretty close to 16/10 over a 13-year career (mostly for winning/playoff teams), good shooting efficiency, too. 2-time All-Star, 1-time All-NBA. That's quite a career for 35th pick.
2nd - Luis Scola at #56. Almost undrafted, averaged nearly 12/7 over 10 years (mostly for winning teams).
3rd - Tayshaun Prince at #23. Excellent defender, great role player for 14 years, starter on a title team, impact beyond his box stats.
Strongly considered Amar'e Stoudemire at #9, but boy was he bad defensively. And he is a top-10 pick after all. He'd be a valid pick though.

Biggest Flops
1st - Jay Williams at #2. It perhaps needs a bit of an asterisk, as his career was ended by a fluke motorcycle accident, iirc (I think he shattered his pelvis). He didn't have a super-impressive rookie year, though.
2nd - Nikoloz Tskitishvili at #6. "Who's that?" you ask. "Exactly," I answer.
3rd - Dajuan Wagner at #7.


I gotta stop there for now; I'll try to get to '03 and '04 soon.
If there are undrafted guys I've missed, please mention them.

Sort of off topic, but I was just thinking the other day how bad that Tyrus Thomas/LaMarcus Aldridge swap was for Chicago.

2003
Best Steals:
1. Kyle Korver was picked at 51 and was a key cog in, like, five different successful cores over a 17-year career. One of the GOAT shooters and an all-star.
2. Leandro Barbosa at 28, ends up playing 850 games and is super important to Phoenix. In his last years, still good enough to get solid MPG on a champion GSW team.
3. Mo Williams playing 818 games picked at 47 is outstanding value. All-star on a successful Cleveland team.

Biggest Flops:
1. Darko obviously. Especially egregious given who came after him.
2. Mike Sweetney...my poor Knicks. 233 games over four years, picked at 9 when we could have had Collison/Diaw/West/Pietrus. Ate himself out of the league.
3. Boston's Troy Bell picked at 16 and played six games. Objectively, that's just horrific value.

What a monster draft. There's 10 guys in the second round who I thought about for this thread. That's how good it was. It wasn't just LBJ and Wade and the stars. This draft set up the league for the next 10 years.

Picking up where I left off......


2003 Draft (greatest ever??)
Biggest Steals
1st - Agree with earlier poster, it's gotta be Kyle Korver at #51. Nearly a GOAT-tier shooter/spacer, floor-warper with his off-ball movement, key cog in a number of good teams, 17-year career (really durable, too).
2nd - Mo Williams at #47. Not a great player, but substantially more than you'd expect of someone taken in the latter half of the 2nd round.
3rd - David West at #19. HM to Zaza Pachulia at #42. Honestly, getting Dwyane Wade at #5 is kind of a steal, too; could go with that one.

Biggest Flops (basically going to agree with prior poster)
1st - Darko Milicic at #2.
2nd- Michael Sweetney at #9.
3rd - Troy Bell at #16 (could put him at 2nd, actually).

This draft did indeed set up the league for the next 15 years.


2004 Draft
Biggest Steals
1st - I'm gonna go with Trevor Ariza: 18 seasons [nearly 33,000 minutes], good defender with impact beyond his box metrics, key cog in a number of good teams (including one title team). Pretty good for going #44 in the draft.
2nd - Kevin Martin at #26.
3rd - Tony Allen at #25. HM to Anderson Varejao at #31. JR Smith, Jameer Nelson, and Al Jefferson all went between 15-20 in the draft (good finds for that late, imo).

Biggest Flops
1st - Rafael Araujo at #8.
2nd - Luke Jackson at #10.
3rd - Robert Swift at #12.

So this is up my alley because I see particular meaning in examining drafts after the fact.

I'm in the middle of a project right now that I hope to share relatively soon, and part of it involves using Englemann's career RAPM with a replacement level to create a career VORP.

With the data I'm using, this ends up leading to about 4-5 players in any given draft who have careers with a VORP of +1000 or greater, and so while each draft is seen differently ahead of time and it's simplistic to talk as if all Top 5 draft picks should be >1000 VORP to be a success, it's a thing to keep in mind.

Going through the years in question:

2000 - only 2 1000+ performers, very shallow

Key performers:

(likely top 5 career VORP)
Hedo Turkoglu (16th) +1615
Kenyon Martin (1st) +1262 (highest Defensive VORP)
Mike Miller (5th) +988
Quentin Richardson (18th) +883
Jamal Crawford (7th) +761 (highest Offensive VORP)

(other Top 5 picks)
Stromile Swift (2nd) -70
Darius Miles (3rd) +393
Marcus Fizer (4th) -154

So let's note that for replacement player levels, I'm using an extremely generous factor, and yet Swift & Fizer still come out as below that level. I think people should be skeptical that top picks like this are actually worse than a G-leaguer...but of course when you're talking about young guys with upside, they tend to get a lot more rope than a G-leaguer, and this gives the opportunity to do more damage.

Regardless, I feel find about saying Swift & Fizer were pretty clear busts, with Hedo being something of a steal. I'll also give a shout out to 2nd Rounder Michael Redd who wasn't far behind Crawford for the 5th spot.

2001 - 8 1000+ performers, deep

(1000+ performers)
Pau Gasol (3rd) +2399
Shane Battier (6th) +2177 (highest Defensive VORP)
Joe Johnson (10th) +2101 (highest Offensive VORP)
Tyson Chandler (2nd) +1629
Tony Parker (28th) +1628
Gerald Wallace (25th) +1498
Jason Richardson (5th) +1331
Gilbert Arenas (31st) +1132

(other Top 5 picks)
Kwame Brown (1st) +7
Eddy Curry (4th) -269

Parker, Wallace & Arenas are the big steals relative to draft pick, while Kwame & Eddy are definite busts.

Shout out also to the Grizzlies who drafted both Gasol & Battier.

2002 - 5 1000+ performers, typical

(1000+ performers)
Nene (7th) +2084 (highest Defensive VORP)
Mike Dunleavy Jr. (3rd) +1409
Tayshaun Prince (23rd) +1342
Yao Ming (1st) +1210
Amar'e Stoudemire (9th) +1011 (highest Offensive VORP)

(other Top 5 picks)
Jay Williams (2nd) +3
Drew Gooden (4th) -131
Nikoloz Tskitishvili (5th) -61

Prince is the steal, Williams, Gooden, Tsktsktsk the busts.
Note that while Gooden by this metric did the most damage to his teams, that's because he played a lot more than the other two, so you can definitely argue that Tsktsktsk is the bigger bust, and given Williams extreme hype, he was definitely the big disappointment of the draft.

2003 - 7 1000+ performers, deep

(1000+ performers)
LeBron James (1st) +7886 (highest Offensive & Defensive VORP)
Dwyane Wade (5th) +2345
Carmelo Anthony (3rd) +1980
Chris Bosh (4th) +1933
Kyle Korver (51st) +1418
Boris Diaw (21st) +1280
Josh Howard (29th) +1051

(other Top 5 pick)
Darko Milicic (2nd) -22

Korver, Diaw & Howard steals, Dark bust.

2004 - 6 1000+ performers, typical

(1000+ performers)
Andre Iguodala (9th) +2865 (highest Defensive VORP)
Luol Deng (7th) +2430 (highest Offensive VORP)
Dwight Howard (1st) +2229
Trevor Ariza (44th) +1335
Tony Allen (25th) +1237
Josh Smith (17th) +1118

(other Top 5 picks)
Emeka Okafor (2nd) +391
Ben Gordon (3rd) +560
Shaun Livingston (4th) +576
Devin Harris (5th) +947

Ariza, Allen & Josh are clear steals, and arguably Iggy & Deng are too. No glaring busts, but Okafor was definitely the biggest disappointment.

Doctor MJ wrote:So this is up my alley because I see particular meaning in examining drafts after the fact.

I'm in the middle of a project right now that I hope to share relatively soon, and part of it involves using Englemann's career RAPM with a replacement level to create a career VORP.

With the data I'm using, this ends up leading to about 4-5 players in any given draft who have careers with a VORP of +1000 or greater, and so while each draft is seen differently ahead of time and it's simplistic to talk as if all Top 5 draft picks should be >1000 VORP to be a success, it's a thing to keep in mind.

Sounds cool. I look forward to it.

Doctor MJ wrote:Going through the years in question:

2000 - only 2 1000+ performers, very shallow

Key performers:

(likely top 5 career VORP)
Hedo Turkoglu (16th) +1615
Kenyon Martin (1st) +1262 (highest Defensive VORP)
Mike Miller (5th) +988
Quentin Richardson (18th) +883
Jamal Crawford (7th) +761 (highest Offensive VORP)

(other Top 5 picks)
Stromile Swift (2nd) -70
Darius Miles (3rd) +393
Marcus Fizer (4th) -154

So let's note that for replacement player levels, I'm using an extremely generous factor, and yet Swift & Fizer still come out as below that level. I think people should be skeptical that top picks like this are actually worse than a G-leaguer...but of course when you're talking about young guys with upside, they tend to get a lot more rope than a G-leaguer, and this gives the opportunity to do more damage.

Regardless, I feel find about saying Swift & Fizer were pretty clear busts, with Hedo being something of a steal. I'll also give a shout out to 2nd Rounder Michael Redd who wasn't far behind Crawford for the 5th spot.

Yeah, that's why I think Redd is probably the biggest steal of the year: because of his placement in the draft. Well behind Turkoglu (whom I had as 2nd-best steal) in your metric, but he's also a whopping 27 picks later.......literally almost an entire round in the draft behind Hedu.
With mid-2nd rounders really you're just hoping to be lucky enough to get a guy who might be a functional bench role player for a few years......with Redd you actually had a guy who was a low-level star for a little while.

This is indeed a somewhat shallow draft class.

Doctor MJ wrote:2001 - 8 1000+ performers, deep

(1000+ performers)
Pau Gasol (3rd) +2399
Shane Battier (6th) +2177 (highest Defensive VORP)
Joe Johnson (10th) +2101 (highest Offensive VORP)
Tyson Chandler (2nd) +1629
Tony Parker (28th) +1628
Gerald Wallace (25th) +1498
Jason Richardson (5th) +1331
Gilbert Arenas (31st) +1132

(other Top 5 picks)
Kwame Brown (1st) +7
Eddy Curry (4th) -269

Parker, Wallace & Arenas are the big steals relative to draft pick, while Kwame & Eddy are definite busts.

Shout out also to the Grizzlies who drafted both Gasol & Battier.

I almost mentioned Battier as a "steal", because I think he's so much better than his box metrics (as your study appears to strongly support). Though he was also a #6 pick [pretty high, in other words].

Thought about listing Curry as one of my flops; didn't realize his RAPM was so poor (sub-replacement level for his career; yikes).

Doctor MJ wrote:2002 - 5 1000+ performers, typical

(1000+ performers)
Nene (7th) +2084 (highest Defensive VORP)
Mike Dunleavy Jr. (3rd) +1409
Tayshaun Prince (23rd) +1342
Yao Ming (1st) +1210
Amar'e Stoudemire (9th) +1011 (highest Offensive VORP)

(other Top 5 picks)
Jay Williams (2nd) +3
Drew Gooden (4th) -131
Nikoloz Tskitishvili (5th) -61

Prince is the steal, Williams, Gooden, Tsktsktsk the busts.

I wonder if Gooden is as poor as this indicates. He was decent enough that teams around the league kept him around for 14 years (often getting serious minutes). Certainly a little bit of a disappointment for #4, but don't know that I'd rate him a total flop.
Could he be victim of some of the short-comings of the metric used???

trex_8063 wrote:

Doctor MJ wrote:So this is up my alley because I see particular meaning in examining drafts after the fact.

I'm in the middle of a project right now that I hope to share relatively soon, and part of it involves using Englemann's career RAPM with a replacement level to create a career VORP.

With the data I'm using, this ends up leading to about 4-5 players in any given draft who have careers with a VORP of +1000 or greater, and so while each draft is seen differently ahead of time and it's simplistic to talk as if all Top 5 draft picks should be >1000 VORP to be a success, it's a thing to keep in mind.

Sounds cool. I look forward to it.

trex_8063 wrote:

Doctor MJ wrote:Going through the years in question:

2000 - only 2 1000+ performers, very shallow

Key performers:

(likely top 5 career VORP)
Hedo Turkoglu (16th) +1615
Kenyon Martin (1st) +1262 (highest Defensive VORP)
Mike Miller (5th) +988
Quentin Richardson (18th) +883
Jamal Crawford (7th) +761 (highest Offensive VORP)

(other Top 5 picks)
Stromile Swift (2nd) -70
Darius Miles (3rd) +393
Marcus Fizer (4th) -154

So let's note that for replacement player levels, I'm using an extremely generous factor, and yet Swift & Fizer still come out as below that level. I think people should be skeptical that top picks like this are actually worse than a G-leaguer...but of course when you're talking about young guys with upside, they tend to get a lot more rope than a G-leaguer, and this gives the opportunity to do more damage.

Regardless, I feel find about saying Swift & Fizer were pretty clear busts, with Hedo being something of a steal. I'll also give a shout out to 2nd Rounder Michael Redd who wasn't far behind Crawford for the 5th spot.

Yeah, that's why I think Redd is probably the biggest steal of the year: because of his placement in the draft. Well behind Turkoglu (whom I had as 2nd-best steal), but he's also a whopping 27 picks later.......literally almost an entire round in the draft behind Hedu.
With mid-2nd rounders really you're just hoping to be lucky enough to get a guy who might be a functional bench role player for a few years......with Redd you actually had a guy who was a low-level star for a little while.

This is indeed a somewhat shallow draft class.

Yeah, I think similar, but will say I was disappointed at how he looks in this metric.

Now, this is a stat that's going to favor longevity more than we typically do when we evaluate players and that's obviously part of what's going on here when Crawford tops Redd, but still, there are well over 100 guys who break the 1000+ threshold in this over the entirety of the data we have. I suppose I'd thought Redd would be Top 100 in that group and he's really not.

trex_8063 wrote:

Doctor MJ wrote:2001 - 8 1000+ performers, deep

(1000+ performers)
Pau Gasol (3rd) +2399
Shane Battier (6th) +2177 (highest Defensive VORP)
Joe Johnson (10th) +2101 (highest Offensive VORP)
Tyson Chandler (2nd) +1629
Tony Parker (28th) +1628
Gerald Wallace (25th) +1498
Jason Richardson (5th) +1331
Gilbert Arenas (31st) +1132

(other Top 5 picks)
Kwame Brown (1st) +7
Eddy Curry (4th) -269

Parker, Wallace & Arenas are the big steals relative to draft pick, while Kwame & Eddy are definite busts.

Shout out also to the Grizzlies who drafted both Gasol & Battier.

I almost mentioned Battier as a "steal", because I think he's so much better than his box metrics (as your study appears to strongly support). Though he was also a #6 pick [pretty high, in other words].

Thought about listing Curry as one of my flops; didn't realize his RAPM was so poor (sub-replacement level for his career; yikes).

Yeah it's really interesting how good Battier looks by this metric. It's only Gasol's longevity that keep Battier from the top spot here.

And yeah, Eddy never figured it out.

trex_8063 wrote:

Doctor MJ wrote:2002 - 5 1000+ performers, typical

(1000+ performers)
Nene (7th) +2084 (highest Defensive VORP)
Mike Dunleavy Jr. (3rd) +1409
Tayshaun Prince (23rd) +1342
Yao Ming (1st) +1210
Amar'e Stoudemire (9th) +1011 (highest Offensive VORP)

(other Top 5 picks)
Jay Williams (2nd) +3
Drew Gooden (4th) -131
Nikoloz Tskitishvili (5th) -61

Prince is the steal, Williams, Gooden, Tsktsktsk the busts.

I wonder if Gooden is as poor as this indicates. He was decent enough that teams around the league kept him around for 14 years (often getting serious minutes). Certainly a little bit of a disappointment for #4, but don't know that I'd rate him a total flop.
Could he be victim of some of the short-comings of the metric used???

Well, you're not wrong. Gooden only tops Tsktsktsk because he played so much more as RAPM-wise he isn't as low as Tsktsktsk.

Further I think we should always be asking with replacement levels whether they are truly fair. Is Gooden actually making his teams worse the more he plays than if they just used a G-leaguer in those minutes?

However, while a player sticking around should make us be skeptical that he's actively doing on-court damage to his team as a matter of course, I have to push back some.

Gooden's someone whose +/- stats I sought out when those stats became publicly available precisely because teams were giving up on him remarkably fast given a) his prospect stature, b) his obvious physical impressiveness, c) his decent box score, and d) him having no particular bad rep as a locker room guy.

For context:

Jerry West became the Memphis Grizzlies GM in 2002 and his first move was to draft Gooden 4th overall in that draft, and midway through that very season West traded him away in a deal where the Orlando Magic gave up a 1st & 2nd round picks.

Let's first pause to recognize how unusual it is for a GM to trade away a top pick mid-rookie season. When that happens, I pay attention if there's not an obvious answer. It appeared that West had literally just decided that a guy he was high on when he was in college the previous year had some kind of major flaw, and while I held off assuming this was truly the case for a good while afterward, yes, I believe that is indeed what West saw and did.

Okay, so moving forward to Orlando - who remember just traded 2 picks to go along with recent ROY Mike Miller to get him (as well as Giricek, but Gooden was seen as the bigger asset). Gooden plays as a starter for the Magic through the end of his rookie season where he logs the 2nd most minutes on the team after TMac.

He keeps this up into the next season and then some as he plays 40+ minutes in the first 3 games as a sophomore (TMac just missed that mark with 39:21 in the 2nd game). He averages 30+ MPG through December, but the minutes fall off distinctly after that.

He would end up very last in the league in +/- that year with a -484. He wasn't alone on that list as this was the year where the TMac Magic collapsed, but let's be clear that Gooden being played less didn't seem plausibly a "tank" move...given that they traded him that next off-season.

Gooden's next team would be the place where he found the most success: The Cleveland Cavaliers. He would start for 3 years, the team would have a positive +/- with him in each year, and that would include a finals run.

Using nbarapm.com, we can see an improvement in his 3-year RAPM in that span ('04-05 to '06-07) compared to before and after. The peak gets him up to -1.4, which would be well above any replacement level estimate I've ever seen.

So that tells us that it's not that Gooden never performed above replacement in his career, it's just that he had spans of it both before and after his time in Cleveland - which we should note involved him playing the majority of his minutes with LeBron James, and might lead us to question just much noise there is in that signal as well as to pour one out the King.

Okay, I think I've said plenty, but there's two more things I want to hit:

- Late in his career, when he's playing a lot less, his RAPM actually gets close to neutral, which leads to a question of whether Gooden really just needed get smarter and take on a lesser role. That may be so, but Gooden continues to have quite bad On-Court and On-Off numbers in that whole time period, so it might also be that playing less minutes is leading to noisier results.

- I think it's clear that part of what was going on toward the end was that Gooden was seen as a respectable veteran leader-type. Jeff Green, another guy with awful numbers on this front, clearly had the same thing going.

As such, it may be that in later years, the locker room value Gooden played was more than enough to make him more valuable to the team than a random replacement level player even if it doesn't show in the +/-.

Of course, it's also possible that in cases like this the coach can overestimate that intangible factor, and it's also possible that this leads the coach to think of the player in question as a proven rotation guys when he should be viewed as a practice guy. For example, maybe Miami had the right idea continuing to pay Udonis Haslem as a legit player while specifically avoiding playing him in real game, whereas another team would have kept Haslem playing minutes seasons too long.

Fascinating that Jerry West was able to see through Gooden in his first year.

sp6r=underrated wrote:Fascinating that Jerry West was able to see through Gooden in his first year.

Remember being disappointed that Miller was being traded, but I was excited to be acquiring Gooden. Man, was he a bum. He was sort of the Jahlil Okafor of the early '00s.