Stillwater wrote:nolang1 wrote:Stillwater wrote:right but often there are at minimum 2 sometimes 3 tournament kings that get a lot of media attn in the last days after the big dance esp ones that were held low and then skyrocket into the mix early esp if they prove themself to be a higher floor and same upside as somebody ranked high all year.
example Butler & or Lewis would definitely get lottery mocked in most media mock drafts after a tournament imo whereas Pat WIlliams and Okoro move back to reality where WIlliams is in the 15 or after club and Okoro is never higher than 6 but Vassell gets pushed into the top 3.
You must have skimmed over the part where I said the NCAA season is finished aka there are no more games to evaluate. It’s in the first sentence. Like I said, you don’t see too many people shooting up into the top 10 based on workouts and the ones who do were probably in that 10-20 range. Giannis is probably the biggest example of a guy coming out of nowhere relatively late in the process, and he went 15th.
This has more to do with who teams are going to pick than who’s going to be the best player eventually, and for lots of teams at the top of the draft the combine/workout stuff is more or less a formality where they’re either locked in on their guy or saying “we’ll just take whoever’s left out of X, Y, and Z.” If you gave me Ball, Edwards, Hayes, Wiseman, Haliburton, Avdija, Okongwu, Toppin, Vassell, and Okoro as a putative top 10, I wouldn’t expect more than 2 of those players to be on the board at pick #11.
It might seem more static because nothing has happened over the last 3-4 months and there aren’t teams/agents putting out smokescreens about who has a promise or who allegedly killed it in a workout, but most years you could do a similar exercise after the college season and get most of the top 10. Hell, most drafts you can probably get 5-6 of the top 10 picks a year out. I think the extent to which an NCAA tournament performance really vaults someone (especially an upperclassman) into the lottery is more a thing of the past given how widespread analytics are.
Last year the NBA’s first round of green room invitations went to 9 players (this was 3-4 weeks before the draft), and Hachimura being drafted directly in front of Reddish was the only thing that kept those players from being the first 9 picks. So yes, I think you can generally trust the consensus and we remember the surprising picks specifically because they’re so rare.
well either way there will be less mock changes than typical post tournament buzz influenced drafts even if the actual draft is different than the mocks now show which it should be. I think there is a good chance Ball for example drops some
or Cole Anthony goes before him even though nobody thinks that on any mocks I see. I think the only team in the league that would take Ball at #1 is NY.
I think there are plenty of sleepers that are not mocked at all in the first by most that are 1st round locks and despite everyone of those prospects you mentioned having a solid shot at the 1-10, two or 3 of them could drop quickly after the combine or a private workout by the simple fact that someone leapfrogs them esp given none of them are really tier 1 prospects with very few flaws. all have some major hole in their game .
Again there are not really any recent examples of the NCAA tournament dramatically swinging top prospects’ stock. Mikal Bridges and De’Andre Hunter were the best prospects on NCAA champions and both went around where people had them before the tournament. Jalen Brunson was the MOP of the Final Four and didn’t get picked until the 2nd round, where he’s actually looked like a steal so far. Guys whose teams get upset or don’t even make the tournament in the first place still get drafted at the top if that’s where they were before. A big tournament might get someone drafted, but not nearly that high up (and individual workouts probably carry even less weight for most teams).
The mock drafts cited in the OP are mostly the result of people talking to front office personnel around the league to get a range on where players might be drafted and going from there; it’s not just some random guy subjectively saying “I think Jaden McDaniels is kinda like KD so I’m gonna put him in the top 5.” So if the NBA people aren’t overreacting to the tournament or individual workouts (which they don’t seem to these days), the mock drafts wouldn’t be either.
