Why 5? Well, it's a nice round number, but it's also the lowest the team with the worst record in the league can end up with right now. It's been that way for a few years and it looks like it will be that way for a while. Top 5 is also where I think we can reasonably say you're expected to find really good players. Yes, some drafts are stronger or weaker than others, but generally, you should be drafting a stud in top 5. Hell, even if the draft is super short on talent, a smart organization will trade the pick then. Either way, you shouldn't end up with a guy you're releasing at the end of their rookie contract or trading for peanuts or generally regretting drafting a few years later.
Well, what would be a somewhat objective way of separating the studs from the duds? Well, I decided to look at Box Plus/Minus for their whole careers. I very much understand the limits and issues of the methodology. BPM is a stat that skews towards big men, it punishes younger player, especially ones on bad teams, and it punishes good players who hang around for too long at the end of their careers. I get all that, but those are issues for another thread. I've picked BPM and I'm curious to see what it tells us.
Partly because it punishes younger players, I decided that my cutoff would be the 2015 draft. Players drafted after that are still young enough to have the opportunity to both break out and fall off a cliff, potentially changing their career numbers. The start date of 1980 is pretty arbitrary. Most players drafted before 1980 I can't remember seeing play so I'm less interested, I guess.
I've chosen 0 as my cutoff. Having a positive BPM for your career makes you a stud, having a negative one makes you a dud. 0.0 is treated as positive. Obviously, this ignores different levels of busts. Some busts are -0.1 and some are -4.0 or worse. Same goes for the studs, but that isn't the point here. 0.0 is a career mark of a decent starter, so the bar is actually fairly low.
The nature of the stat itself and the sharp cutoff means there are some situations that would likely provoke heavy debate. Keith Van Horn is a stud while Rik Smits is a bust according to BPM. In both cases not my much, but still. Again, these are debates for a different thread. Len Bias is obviously a controversial one, but I've put him under busts because he didn't play a game in the league and every Celtic employee and fan wishes they'd drafted someone else(or traded the pick).
Players are also considered selections of a team they played their first NBA game for. You're the bust of the team that found you most valuable before you ever played in the league. That includes not only draft night trades, but also situations like Danny Ferry refusing to report to the Clippers and spending a whole year in Europe. No one held a gun to the Cavs' head to force them into that trade and send Ron Harper to the Clippers. Same goes for Wiggins and the Wolves. They didn't initially pick Wiggins, but they sure thought he was worth Love. Their bust, not Cavs'.
And I get that this is all relative. Some may question why Tristan Thompson is a bust, when he was the starting center on a team that went to 4 NBA finals. Well, in vacuum, that's a decent career. It looks different when you consider that he was the 4th pick. Decent starter and 6th best player on a championship team is someone you should be looking for in the late first round. Being decent at #4 isn't good enough.
That said, let's take a look at the table. I've highlighted the busts only. I put team names instead of player names, but I figure it's super easy to find who the players in question are by googling.
The first thing that jumps out to me is just how many busts there have been. 42% of all players drafted in top five over a 36-year period were busts. The crazy thing is that it may actually be getting worse, statistically. In the 80s, it was 48%, in the 90s, it was only 24%, but then it starts going up again. It was 46% in the 2000s, and it's 53% in the partial sample of the 2010s. And with all the Bagleys and Fultzes and Josh Jacksons in the later part of the 2010s, it's not looking like the average will improve much.
Now, I get that some of this has to do with draft prospects being ever more raw nowadays, but you would think that improvements in scouting and player development would offset some of that.
The numbers do show that having a #1 pick is a bit more of a guarantee of finding a stud and we have fewest duds at that spot. Still, 10 out of 36 first picks in this sample were busts. That's 28% or almost 1 in 3 chance. It doesn't seem to differ by decade, either.
It's expected that #5 picks would be most likely to be busts, but I didn't expect that they'd share that dubious honour with #2 picks. That's kinda crazy, actually. 56% of all #2 picks are busts so you're actually more likely to get a bust then a stud there. It's even more shocking when you consider that only a third of #3 picks were busts. That seems like it's statistically significant and I wonder if there's a reason. Do teams tend to reach more with #2 picks? Is there more pressure there than at number 3?
There has only been one draft where all 5 top picks were studs, so let's name those guys. In 1996, top five picks were Iverson, Camby, Shareef, Marbury, and Ray Allen. Of course, the two best players in this draft weren't even picked in top 5 and some of these top 5 guys had spotty careers, but you can see why people talk about this draft is being perhaps the best ever. You don't get a guy with a negative career BPM until Lorenzen Wright at #7.
There has not been a draft with all 5 top picks being duds, but there have been four of them where four out of five have been duds. There has only been one draft like that in the past 35 years, and that was 2006. We should really be talking about this draft as one of the worst ever. LaMarcus Aldridge is the only player in top 5 to have had anything resembling a career. Bargnani, Adam Morrison, Tyrus Thomas and Shelden Williams are more memes than NBA player at this point.
'85 and '86 were two unusually bad drafts back-to-back, at least if you were picking top 5. 8 of the 10 players were busts. Even the one guy in 1986 was Brad Daugherty, who was a good player but injuries ended his career at 28. Most people know how bad that draft was, but 1985 was quite bad at the top, too. Obviously, the Knicks got Ewing in the first ever lottery, and he's a legend. Then you've got Wayman Tisdale(way better singer than baller), Benoit Benjamin, Xavier McDaniel and Jon Koncak. Sure, McDaniel was an All-Star in his one good season in Seattle, but most of his career was middling. And he was a bad defender all his career, and let's remember he got picked 4th. The 6th pick in that 1985 draft was Joe Kleine, who was also really bad. The draft is made better by having Mullin, Oakley, Schrempf and Karl Malone being picked within the next 7 spots, but even that includes guys like Keith Lee and Kenny Green between them.
Finally, it's interesting to look at teams themselves. There are teams that obviously didn't have too many top 5 draft picks over the years, so there was less of a chance to select busts to begin with. Looking at you Spurs and the Lakers. There are also teams like my Jazz who have gotten absolute studs at lower picks but massively screwed up when drafting high. Kanter and Exum 3 years apart. Oh, how 2021 might have looked different if the Jazz didn't waste both those picks.
There are some crazy streaks, too. The Wolves and their three busts over 5 years from 2010-2014. The Cavs with 3 busts in 4 years over the same period but still winning a chip because LeBron decided to return. That's actually crazy. Can you imagine if they didn't take Thompson, Waiters and Bennett? Just one of those picks being better or being traded for even a borderline star might have led to LeBron staying in Cleveland until today.
The Hornets. Oh my, the Hornets. Three straight years in the mid-2000s when they had #2, #5 and #3 pick and messed up all of them. Then again in 2012 and 2013. Bulls with 5 top-5 picks between 2000 and 2006 they screwed up.
How about the Warriors being the only team to end up with two busts at #1 between 1980 and 2015? Maybe I don't begrudge them their recent success so much now that I look at that.
Same with the current champs. Look at the all duds in the 90s for the Nuggets. How about the Pacers in the late 80s? Those Reggie-led teams during the years MJ played baseball might have looked different if their haul with two #2 and a 4# pick wasn't Tisdale, Chuck Person and Smits? I've stayed away from suggesting who could've been taken by any pick in this discussion, but I'll do it now. Imagine Reggie, Malone, Mark Price and Mitch Richmond. Hell, imagine just Reggie and Karl instead of Reggie and Smits.
TL/DR: It's off season. If you don't like, there are plenty of threads about NBA players in trouble with the law, drinking in Serbia, or discussing what "World Champions" means you can read.
