Post#903 » by payitforward » Sat May 16, 2020 12:37 am
The thing is... the relationship between the order of how good players turn out to be & the order in which they are picked is pretty close to random from pick #4 through the end of the R1 -- every year.
I have no idea why people are so pointlessly attached to high picks -- as if they gave a team access to the best prospects. Picks 1-3 there is some correlation; after that... none. Zero.
Here's a draft at random, 2008. In fact, this one I'll take from 2-end of the lottery. & then we'll look at later picks:
Michael Beasley, O.J. Mayo, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love, Danilo Gallinari, Eric Gordon, Joe Alexander, D.J. Augustin, Brook Lopez, Jerryd Bayless, Jason Thompson, Brandon Rush & Anthony Randolph.
13 players. Out of which
4 complete busts -- guys who basically had no NBA career at all: O.J. Mayo, Joe Alexander, Jason Thompson & Anthony Randolph.
3 bad-to-meh players -- guys you can pick up pretty much any time if for some reason you need one of them, hence no reason to waste a draft pick on one of them -- certainly not a high draft pick! (Beasley, Bayless, Rush)
3 ok players -- have had pretty good careers & are good at something (Gordon, Augustin, Lopez)
3 outstanding players (Westbrook, Love, Gallinari)
That is the absolute top of the draft (aside from the #1 pick). Here's who went from #21-26: Ryan Anderson, Courtney Lee, Kosta Koufos, Serge Ibaka, Nicolas Batum & George Hill.
Then came R2, where 5 of the first 7 picks were better than more than 1/2 of those 13 I listed above: Nikolas Pekovic, DeAndre Jordan, Mario Chalmers, Omer Asik & Luc Mbah a Moute.
2009 was, if anything, even worse. Ditto 2010. 2011 was worse than all those. 2012 wasn't much better.... You starting to get my point? "less research" couldn't make the pick order less like the actual order of how good players were.
The only way you could really do worse is via "pin the tail on the donkey" -- which we know, because it was the method Ernie Grunfeld used.
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