Tanking

The anti-Pacers are the Chicago Bulls. They have not appeared in an NBA Finals since Michael Jordan left, despite this run of top 10 picks:

1999- No. 1 Elton Brand
2000 - No. 4 Marcus Fizer; No. 7 Chris Mihm
2001 - No. 2 Tyson Chandler (obtained for Brand); No. 4 Eddy Curry
2002 - No. 2 Jay Williams
2003 - No. 7 Kirk Hinrich
2004 - No. 3 Ben Gordon
2005 - No pick
2006 - No. 2 LaMarcus Aldridge (traded for No. 4 Tyrus Thomas)
2007 - No. 9 Joakim Noah
2008 - No. 1 Derrick Rose
2009-2013 - "Basketball Hell."

 

I am not close to being an expert so someone please tell whether these picks were monumentally stupid, bad luck or good picks? Or somewhere in the middle?

Is the NBA draft just a total crap shoot? Maybe 2 players in each draft will make more than 1 All Star team, maybe 6 players in each draft will be quality starters. And which player will it be? Are picks 2-5 interchangeable?

 

I think that the crapshoot aspect comes into play when you're talking about draft classes, as opposed to selections within a year. You've got to hit the lottery in a stacked year - getting LeBron at No. 1, for example, as opposed to Anthony Bennett or Michael Olawokandi.

A few nights ago, my brother-in-law went through all the drafts since about '95, seeing where future HOFers and All-Stars were taken. Pretty shocking to see Kobe and Nash both taken after the top 12 in the same draft.

Somewhere on the Internet - perhaps at 82games.com, I'll look - there's a chart showing career averages of players for each draft position. It pretty much goes exactly like you think it would.

 

One trend I notice is most of those guys are undersized for the positions they play (Noah, Curry and Chandler being the exceptions).


Shouldn't Deng be on this list?

 

I think the cure to a lot of what ails the NBA could be fixed by giving teams a franchise player like they do in the NFL. Instead these days if you have a top player on a small market team it becomes a question of how long they can keep them there until they demand a trade or leave via free agency.

 

He wasn't drafted by the Bulls, officially, but you're right. No different than including Chandler. Deng was the seventh pick in 2004, I think.

 

1995 would be an interesting place to start since that's when the high school players started coming. I think that fucked things up for a lot of teams. You look at that list of guys the Bulls picked and there are a lot of great players, but quite a few of them took a few years to become the players that they are now and are probably on a different team than the one that drafted them.

 

Average career stats by draft pick:

http://www.82games.com/nbadraftpicks.htm

 

Interesting that Jordan was a #3 overall and is not included in the chart.

 

It starts in '89.

It would be cool to do it for the previous years - see if teams are getting better at it.

 

This analysis has the Bucks as the best drafting team over that 20-year span:

http://www.82games.com/bestdraftingteams.htm

 

Less Green specifically and more "top 5 pick" that turns into some of Green's ilk---a decent starter who can't carry a team. People around here seem to assume that any lottery pick in the '14 draft will be a franchise player, when that's probably far from true.