Using Numbers to Find the Best Draft Pick (Part 1)
In today’s article, I used math to determine the best draft pick in the last 15 years (since 2009) by averaging out the win shares of every lottery pick. You’ll get to see which picks have exceeded expectations and those who have failed to meet them as well as the best players at every class and which pick has the highest share of rookie of the year awards. Take a read!
The odds of an NBA draft going exactly to plan—meaning each pick is better than the next—are slim to none. There are steals and busts all over the draft board. From 2009-2012, there wasn’t a single draft where the top two picks led their class in win shares, and only in 2012 did the number one pick, Anthony Davis, lead his class in win shares.
From 2013-2016, the difficulty in picking the right player is evident as 2015 first overall pick, Karl-Anthony Towns, has so far blown a fairly weak class out of the water in win shares, but in 2013, Anthony Bennett was cemented as the worst first overall pick in history. He finished last in total win shares out of all of the first 29 picks of the draft.
Elsewhere, you can see slight trends such as unexpected success at the 11th and 12th overall picks in the form of Steven Adams, Myles Turner, and Domantas Sabonis. Adams and Sabonis let their lotteries in win shares. You’ll also notice that of the first eight drafts I’ve shown you, the 2nd pick misses over and over again. In the first eight lotteries, the 2nd pick never placed higher than 5th in win shares.
Many observations can be made from the 2017-2020 drafts, but none stand out more to me than the continued dominance of the third overall pick and the late-lottery success.
Jayson Tatum and Luka Doncic were the best players out of the gate from their classes and remain the kings of the hill. Both were drafted at the 3rd overall pick in the years after reigning Finals MVP Jaylen Brown was taken at #3. The 2024 NBA Finals participants, Tatum and Doncic, join James Harden and Joel Embiid as 3rd overall picks who led their class' lotteries in win shares.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in 2018 and Tyrese Haliburton in 2020 became the latest 11th and 12th overall picks to have success, and in 2017, two of top four players in the entire class were taken at the end of the lottery (Donovan Mitchell and Bam Adebayo).
From 2021-2023, we see a higher hit rate on the top overall picks. Cade Cunningham and Jalen Green might be low in win shares because of their lack of team success, but we know what they are capable of. Picks #3 and #4, Evan Mobley and Scottie Barnes, are the two best players from their class so far.
In 2022, four of the top six picks were picks 1-4, and as of now, number one pick, Paolo Banchero, appears to be the consensus best overall player.
In 2023, Victor Wembanyama and Brandon Miller emerged as the top two players from their class and Amen Thompson, the fourth overall pick, was successful in the win shares department.
Now, as I said at the beginning of the article, looking at these draft classes’ lotteries are fun, but there are no evident patterns because it is so hard for GMs to make the correct pick. This next graph will show the average win shares (equating every class so it has has the same value) at every lottery pick to see which picks have boomed and busted in the last fifteen years.
Here is the same graph in order of the average win shares at each pick.
As you can see, the 3rd and the 1st pick are far and away the best two picks in these drafts (the gap between the 1st and the 7th picks is bigger than the gap between the 7th and the 8th picks), but it is the 3rd pick that comes out on top. That makes sense when you see that the 3rd pick has outplayed the 1st pick in eight of these 15 drafts. Players like James Harden, Joel Embiid, Luka Doncic, Jayson Tatum, and Evan Mobley are the cause behind the upset. Of the three players in these lotteries who have won MVP, the third pick has two of them (Harden and Embiid).
The next big surprise is that the 7th and the 12th pick have taken huge leaps (the 12th pick being in 4th was the biggest surprise for me). The 7th pick features some solid talents like Lauri Markkanen and Julius Randle, who are both All-Stars, but it comes down to Steph Curry who gives the 7th pick a massive boost into the top three. He is the other player to have won an MVP, and he did so twice in 2015 and 2016. Tyrese Haliburton, Steven Adams, and Jalen Williams lift the 12th pick into the top four.
Now, we get to what was the biggest upset of any in calculating the best lottery picks. The 2nd pick is all the way down in 10th place, and that because it has virtually no stars and a load of busts. Read the names: Hasheem Thabeet, Evan Turner, Derrick Williams, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Jabari Parker, Lonzo Ball, Marvin Bagley III, James Wiseman, etc. All of these players had high expectations going into their drafts and never came out right on the other side.
Finally, the lists concludes with the 8th overall pick, who, somehow, have been worse on average than any other pick in the lottery. Not a single player picked 8th overall since 2009 has appeared in the All-Star game, making them the only pick to not have an All-Star representative. In fact, here are the number of All-Star appearances by every pick.
Once again, the 1st and 3rd pick lap the field, and then some. However, despite the close margin between those picks, the 1st pick has 10 All-Stars to the 3rd pick’s seven.
There are also picks that get all or near all of their All-Star selections from one player. Damian Lillard is responsible for all eight of the 6th pick’s appearances. Steph Curry has 10 of the 7th pick’s 13 selections.
Finally, here are the picks that received the most Rookie of the Year votes. I awarded one point for a 3rd place finish, two points for a 2nd place finish, and three points for winning the award.
As you can see, the 1st pick tends to be justified in the first year out of the draft. The 3rd pick finished in second place, but their mere 10 points implies that they have some late bloomers. Three picks never received a Rookie of the Year vote in the last 15 seasons including the 8th pick which is the clear worst pick of the lottery.
Does this all mean that Zaccharie Risacher and Reed Sheppard have the best chance of panning out among everybody in the 2024 draft? Will Rob Dillingham be the bust of the draft? Do Donovan Clingan and Nikola Topic have potential to be the steals of the first round? The answer is no. None of this information means anything given how much parity there has been in draft history.
Regardless, I hope you enjoyed part one of this experiment. Part two will investigate rookie salaries for every pick to see which picks have had the best value over the years.