Do We Know a Weak NBA Draft When We See It?
And how sure can we be that 2024 is one?
Victor Wembanyama and the 2023 NBA Draft were always going to be a tough act to follow. That star-studded class, which also featured Brandon Miller, Scoot Henderson and the Thompson Twins, among other anticipated prospects, had been anxiously awaited for years ahead of time — not least of all because of Wemby was the game’s most hyped prospect since LeBron James. Up against that, the 2024 class was fated to seem more than a little flat by comparison.
But the general consensus seems to be that this year’s group of prospects, who will have their names called tonight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, is exceptionally weak even if we toss out the Wemby factor as a point of contrast. Neither of the two top prospects, Frenchmen Zaccharie Risacher and Alex Sarr, are projected to be franchise-altering talents, and there’s plenty of uncertainty around who will get taken in the rest of the lottery… to say nothing about the rest of the draft as a whole.
How much does that tell us, though, when it comes to whether a draft class will actually produce a lot of value? Let’s take a look at how predictive the perceived quality of a class (or lack thereof) has been in recent years.
For the purposes of this story, I’ll be using the overall prospect grades from NBADraft.net, since they go back to at least 2009. I’ll also be looking only at the projected/mock lottery each year, to keep things simple, and weighting each pick by the expected value of that pick slot when the occasion calls for it.1
Indeed, based on that data, the Class of 2024 shows up as notably weak compared with other draft classes since 2009. Risacher, the projected No. 1 pick, is tied with Alex Len — the top pre-draft prospect of 2013 (a notably bad class in which the Cavs ended up taking Anthony Bennett, one of the biggest busts in NBA history, at No. 1) — for the lowest-graded top prospect of any class in our data.
And similarly, the weighted average of scouting grades in the projected lottery for 2024 is second-worst among the classes since ‘09, ahead of only 2011 — a class that delivered Kyrie Irving at No. 1, but whose best overall players probably went 15th (Kawhi Leonard) and 30th (Jimmy Butler) overall.
This confirms the reputation that — on paper — yes, the 2024 draft is devoid of top-end talent. (Surprisingly, the vaunted 2023 class doesn’t rank that much higher here, despite Wemby being tied for the third-best headliner. He might have been underrated in that respect!) But is a weak class on paper destined to be one in reality?
Going back to the 2009 draft, there’s certainly some vague relationship between the perceived quality of a class — or at least, its top prospects — and how much value its projected lottery produces in their first three NBA seasons.2
We can see this both in the correlation (0.40 between weighted lottery grades and WAR) and anecdotally: The No. 1-regarded class by weighted lottery grade (2010) ended up third-best by WAR produced; the No. 2-regarded class (2012) ended up first. No lottery class that ranked among the Top 4 by scouting grades ended up outside the Top 5 in actual value.
But there’s also quite a bit of variance around the relationship overall. The projected lottery of 2015 was supposed to be among the top half of classes (6th-best) in our data; it ended up being the worst by actual WAR. The projected lottery of 2017 was supposed to be among the bottom half of classes (8th); it ended up being 4th-best. And that 2011 Kyrie-led class that was roughly as disrespected as this year’s prospects? It ended up ranking around the middle of the pack (8th) in actual value.
While we don’t see in our sample any cases of a projected lottery rated as low as 2024’s leaping all the way up to being among the most productive classes, it’s far from out of the question that this year’s top prospects end up being a lot better than the “weak-class” tag that they’ve been carrying around for the past few years.
And that’s just the lottery. The depth of the players who land outside of the lottery might also help this draft class shed its poor reputation — especially considering that those players have been making more of a difference at the NBA level in recent seasons.
None of this is to say that anyone from the Class of 2024 will be challenging Wemby (or Anthony Davis, Zion Williamson, John Wall, Blake Griffin or any of the other highly graded top prospects from the sample of seasons we looked at) in early-career production anytime soon. It’s probably fair to expect less out of this year’s prospects than a typical draft.
But in the end, predictions about “weak” or “strong” draft classes can only take us so far. The rest is up to which prospects develop to be better than expected, how they fit on their new teams, and how changes to the game around them suit their skill sets — all factors that can make weak drafts stronger, or strong ones weaker, in retrospect.
Filed under: NBA
My weights for this are based on how many Estimated RAPTOR WAR a player produced in his first three years after the draft. The regression formula for expected value at any slot is:
Expected WAR = 9.867163 - 2.455957 * ln(Overall Pick)
Interestingly, the grade given to the No. 1 prospect alone actually correlates slightly more with a lottery class’ eventual production than the weighted top-to-bottom grade for the full projected lottery. But we’ll use the weighted version anyway, just to account for every prospect in the mock lottery.
There used to be an expression for the NFL Draft that the difference between a very strong Draft and a weak one was just two players. A thin margin. That reflected how relatively few players in the first round worked out as planned along with a super high bust rate. That wasn't the case for the NBA historically...but it is now.
Impact players are today limited in number and rarely are found outside the top 10. Compare the 1984 Draft (or any in the 80s for that matter) - a ton of talent and some really good players later in the picks.
I suspect that the one-and-done paradigm has dramatically reduced the very large sample size for American collegiate players that previously existed and made transitions and projections easier. Three years after the 84 Draft, the story wasn't Jordan, Barkley, Olajuwon or Stockton, it was how disappointing Sam Bowie was. In other words, the upside projections were far more accurate and less surprising then. The rare early busts were the focus. Today, on the other hand, only a few will make a material impact with many not working out.
I wonder if the market response is to now look to Europe to reduce risk. It used to be said that the Europeans were more skilled than their American collegiate counterparts e.g. Tony Kukoc. However, that faded a great deal - seemingly a lot after Darko was taken after LeBron. It seemed to change again with Doncic.
I remember driving home from work as the ESPN radio team was critical of Dallas trading the very popular Trae Young for Doncic...saying Dallas was robbed. That sort of thinking lasted for a couple of years as the media incessantly tracked and compared the two. No more.
Europe is back in fashion in a big way. Although, it now seems to be more about being NBA ready than a deep skill palette. A fascinating trend in any event.