I need help plugging these numbers into excel in a pseudo-scientific way. What I did thus far was credit each position with 1 point for yielding an all-star type player and 3 points for yielding a superstar type player.
The problem is that I'm relying far too heavily on my own judgement to decide who's worth 1 point and who's worth 3. Are Josh Smith and Al Jefferson good enough to get a point for being all-star type players? Is Chris Bosh good enough to be worth 3 points, or just 1?
PP wrote:Then do the same for 1985-1995 and virtually every top-20 player in that era will have been a top-five lotto pick. Most top three.
Absolutely. I didn't follow the NBA during those years, and although I'm pretty well-read about hoops history by this point, I found myself wondering who a lot of the guys are who were drafted outside the top 10 or even top 5 during some of those years.
The guessing game began precisely in 1996, the year after KG was drafted. All of the sudden in that year, high school players picked in the middle of the middle of the first round had the potential to be superstars. It was a total crapshoot, and there was significantly less benefit for drafting towards the top.
Even so, there are a lot more points coming from the top 5 draft picks during those years than there are coming from picks 6-10
I think the current situation, with the best prospects going to school for one year will turn out to be halfway in between these two eras.
1985-1995: The era when virtually
all of the great players were drafted in the top 5, and where #1 picks were instant all-stars.
1996-2006: The crapshoot era where #1 overall picks were likely to be stars, but the rest of the lotto was almost a level playing field (due to impossibility of accurately scouting players). More good players were drafted #9 than #2.
2007 - ?: Somewhere in-between. I think we will find that as long as current rules are in place, the #2 and #3 picks will yield more good players than the #4 and #5 picks, but we will also see an occasional good player being drafted later in the first round, as we did in the crapshoot era.
The only way we could return to very predictable drafts is if the age limit is raised one more year so that college players are evaluated for two full seasons. But in spite of all of that, there has always been a clear incentive to draft early.
