lilfishi22 wrote:Revived wrote:lilfishi22 wrote:I am. Because it is. That Bucks pick will *always* be a higher pick than #31 and that alone already makes it more valuable.
Regardless of what happens in Milwaukee, that pick will always be a 1st round pick while an early second will always be an early second. Everything else, my opinion of the Bucks future, your opinion of the Bucks future is subjective. Even if you're right and they get much better, that Bucks pick will still end up being a 1st round pick. If I'm right, that pick could potentially be a lotto pick. But a 1st will always be a higher pick than a 2nd rounder....that's objective.
You have to compare draft classes. For example, I think many would agree that a top 10 pick from the 2012 draft which featured players like Davis, Beal, Lillard, Barnes, Drummond etc all going in the top 10 over a top 10 pick from the 2013 draft which basically just had Oladipo and McCollum in terms of meaningful contributors.
You're banking on the Bucks not working through unrealistic possibilities imo. Sure Giannis can get hurt. Sure Budenholzer could not work out there. Sure Giannis can get hurt. But the chances of that happening are similar to that of perhaps KD/Curry have a rift and the Warriors being bad. Perhaps the players tune out Kerr like they did for half of the regular season according to him. Perhaps they develop chemistry issues with their 4 all stars wanting to be "the man".
Unlikely but possible but that wouldn't make the Warriors 1st rd pick anything but worthless as well.
Perhaps I'm too naive in thinking this draft is deeper than the one next year or the year after. Of course I can only base it off high school rankings and such which is much different from college rankings so I can definitely be wrong. But I feel the #31 in this draft is better than what I'm expecting to be #24 or later in the next two drafts, which I feel like will be relatively weak drafts in terms of how deep it is compared to this one.
But comparisons in terms of the "strength" of draft classes really doesn't extend past the late teens. After the late teens even in this particularly strong draft, it gets super murky and the talent is as varied as it is in every other draft. So when people say this is a strong draft, they usually mean there's a strong lotto class but after lotto, it's a total luck of the draw.
The 20-40 range of guys are just more of a crapshoot than the lotto prospects. I looked at multiple draft classes, from legendary ones (2003) to the poor ones recently (2013) and I looked at the possible minutes and games played by those guys in that 20-40 range and there's no correlation to the strength of the lotto picks.
In a legendary draft like 2003, the players drafted in the 20-40 range played 15.1% of all possible minutes and 33% of all possible games to date. In the Anthony Bennett 2013 draft, which was billed as one of the worst in recent history, those 20-40 draftees played 19.7% of all possible minutes and 45% of all possible games to date.
Other classes
2015 (KAT/DLo): 17.8% of all minutes and 49.7% of all games
2013 (Bennett/Oladipo): 19.7% of all minutes and 49.7% of all games
2012 (Davis/MKG): 17.1% of all minutes and 40.1% of all games
2011 (Kyrie/Derrick Williams): 20% of all minutes and 42.7% of all games
2008 (Rose/Beasley): 26.1% of all minutes and 51.3% of all games
2003 (Lebron/Darko): 15.1% of all minutes and 33% of all games
With regards to Milwaukee, I don't think they'll be an elite playoff team but that's neither here or there because I think we can both agree than a 1st round pick will be higher value than a 2nd round pick in every draft.
I just think the first pick of the second round is equivalent to one of last picks of the first round depending on the draft. But you're right that it can be a crapshoot which I mentioned earlier since it's hard to project drafts so early. Will have to agree to disagree on the premise of this argument.
I'll give you props and the and-1 for doing the research on the previous drafts though.
