Perhaps someone can defend this, and I’m open to the discussion, but I think most NBA fans have an erroneous notion of what value means in the draft.
There is so much groupthink around the draft order, and then we mistake that as “consensus” about the likely draft order, and then we assign “value” to each prospect based on that consensus.
I keep seeing people evaluate possible draft prospects and say things like “he’s good value at 14” or people imply bad value and say, “I want him in the 20’s but not at 14.”
I believe that kind of thinking really misses the point.
Once the draft is over, it won’t matter very much where guys were selected.
They become real players on your team and then they’re either a good player and a good fit or they are not.
If there’s a guy available at 14 that the Spurs believe is the best player available we should take him there regardless of what the “consensus” “value” is.
It would be a shame to trade down and possibly miss on the next Giannis or Kawhi or Bam or even the next Brunson or Vanvleet.
Yeah, I’ve had this battle for many years with people who aren’t thinking outside the norm. Life’s currency is time… and most people don’t want to spend the time, and that’s just the reality of it. For those who don’t want to spend time, they lean on the so called “experts”. Leave them be is my opinion.
When it comes to pre-draft analysis and general consensus, going against it for the sake of being different rarely works.
And when it doesn't, you look like an idiot. Primo pick, for example.
But I agree about the value when we're talking about picks outside of top10 that can't get you many assets if you move down.
If we had the #2 pick last season and still preferred Castle we would've been dumb not to move down since Wizards wanted Sarr badly, but I don't care if a player is projected to picked at the end of first round and we use a #14 pick on him.
If Spurs think that's their guy, then he should be their guy.
But then we go back to looking like idiots if they completely miss.
That’s why you shouldn’t look at mock drafts. They are useless. Go watch the tape, go look at the stats, take a peak at the analytics. See if the on tape athleticism matches up with the combine numbers. Evaluate their size and length and what that means historically. The draft will not go how you expect. Teams have different models and methods for how they put a draft board together. I think the best way to go about it is evaluating who the player is now and the potential of what they can become. While also taking into consideration what a player can be if he doesn’t reach that expectation. What is a players floor. Once you find the ceiling and floor you measure their median outcome. Once you know the median outcome you weigh that with your teams fit and needs.
It’s not an exact science and where you are as a franchise will often dictate how you draft. A team that is in tear down/tanking mode (jazz, wizards, nets) may draft differently than a team that is on the rise (spurs, rockets, pistons). Even more so a team on the fringe of contending may draft differently than a true contender. Weighing fit, need, median outcomes, potential, floors and “value” has no exact manual.
True. The only “value” present is the impact the draft number has on the assigned rookie salary scale. Therefore if you draft a player that underperforms compared to his rookie salary, you suffer that player’s salary impact difference with less ROI than a player that outperforms his rookie contract salary. However, drafting a player you really want at 14 compared to his projected rank of 20 isn’t a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. In reality, drafting 5-10 slots above or below your pick point isn’t going to kill the team. It’s more bragging rights than anything else.
Agreed. I think the Spurs have historically been okay with looking out of step sometimes because sticking to their own draft assessments and their own board has generally worked out more often than not.
they are not paid the same, so the notion that after the draft it doesn't matter where they are drafted, it's just not true
That's true in the short term, and certainly worth keeping in mind for the short term. OldMan88 made a similar point and it is true.
However rookie contracts are relatively cheap and after the rookie extension the eventual the salary will match the player's outcome.
Picking Gianni's 15th eventually means paying him half a billion dollars while picking Anthony Bennett 1st costs a mere $16million (and your pride I hope!).
I think it's true that the most important thing about drafting is to be right rather than follow the consensus. If Primo had been a good player, then it would not have matter how high he was drafted. Masai "overdrafted" Siakam and did really well because of it. He also "overdrafted" Cabocolo and ... didn't.
However, I think it's wrong-headed to ignore the idea of value or consensus, because the best way to maximizing the impact of a draft is to know when the best spots to take players is. Like if the Spurs like Johnson more than Harper, they'd be foolish to not try to trade down with Philly, Charlotte or Utah to snag Tre and get a pick. To not do so would be bad value UNLESS the actual consensus was so different from the media consensus that such a trade down wasn't actually possible.
That's why ultimately I talk a lot of about wanting the Spurs to be "confident" in their decisions more than caring what those decisions are. They need to navigate the board well just as they did back in 2011. If Fleming is the next Kawhi, and they think he's a middle-first guy, take him at 14. If they think he'll go at the end of the first and can move out of 14 for assets and slip back in the late first to snag him, that's fine. What I don't want is for them to have no idea how to manage this draft and end up with like Bailey and Clayton at 2 and 14 and we hear about all the moves other teams made that the Spurs didn't make, it would feel unideal, even if the players turned out to be good. That's in contrast to the Spurs trading down for those players, picking up three unprotected firsts. Even if those players suck, at least they got good value, even if Harper and Flemming were good player taken with the picks the Spurs traded down from.
Good topic. Hope everyone reads it.
Multiple players, Wiseman and Bagley come to mind, had their development cycles cut short because of where they were drafted. Bagley got salary dumped, as did Wiseman because they were drafted high enough that their drafting teams no longer wanted to extend them, pay them an eight figure salary, or tie up more than their QO on cap holds. They may have been given more time had they been drafted at 10 or 15.
Draft position and value may not always matter, but it can.
I feel like those guys got dumped once it was clear they were busts.
Do we really think either would have turned out better if given (even more) opportunities than they got?
Bagley is still in the league 7 years later. That seems like plenty of time to become something. He’s a decent end of bench big.
Wiseman is injury prone, has no heart, and kind of just sucks.
Last edited by couchman; 05-24-2025 at 11:18 PM.
I may be one of the few dissenting voices, but there are many things that draft order impacts post draft. Salary, of course, but where a player is drafted impacts the mentality of the team and the player. For instance, a player drafted at 30 has low expectations and limited opportunities. Where as a #1 pick is almost guaranteed playing time, plus carrying the pressure of expectation.
I’ve found in life, people are often the victim of expectation for better or worse.
As for consensus, expected draft order is set from years of analysis, it’s not mindless thumb in the air gut feeling. Drafting is so hard because both high and low drafted players have to have the right mentality to succeed. The most successful players are the ones that are their own worst critic and truly don’t need outside motivation to be work hard and persevere. It’s the trait that Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan share with Nikola Jokic and Tom Brady. Their draft position don’t matter, but they are the rarest breed.
Most commonly, you get people that work only to their expectations and will bring value at the level they have shown through life to that point, proving the consensus draft position to be true or they can’t handle the NBA mentally. All of these prospects are physically capable of the playing in the league, failure is between the ears 99% of the time, assuming injury isn’t a factor.
This also speaks to the concept of ‘bust’, which is VERY draft positional in nature. Bagley averaged almost exactly 14/7 his first three years. It was clear that he could play. It was also clear that he wouldn’t be a franchise guy, although he was picked in a spot where you want and kind of expect one. For his production, in retro dollars, anywhere from 3/$75M to 3/$90M would have been fair,but he and his agent likely would not have accepted that from Sacto because his draft peers would be getting more. Expectations are set by the draft slot, both for the team AND the player.
Drafting a player too high definitely impacts their role and speeds up the expectations in some situations. But what stage the team is at is huge, too. When the Spurs drafted Primo we were looking for a future star. He could have theoretically done well as a second unit guy who got hot from 3 now and then.
Then I think of someone like Kuminga who is afforded more time because the team already has stars and is at a different stage.
Looking back at our Primo and Luka picks in the teens and contrasting that to picking 1, 4, and now 2, it seems obvious to me in hindsight that trying to find a star later in the draft is really hard and we should have just drafted good role players. But easy to say now.
Or, if we were drafting Devin now it would be perfect, but he's already gone through a situation where he was given higher expectations and now we don't know what to do with him.
Anyway. Just rambling.
Great addition to the convo and I can’t say I disagree with you.
All of y’all are getting to a different but very related topic, which is that the situation a player is drafted into can significantly affect their outcome.
Yeah, guys like Duncan and Jordan would have become superstars anywhere they went, but does Dejounte develop into an All star anywhere else?
Is Manu actually a 8x all star somewhere else where he is fully unleashed or does his career end with a whimper 5+ years earlier because he is injury prone with too many minutes?
Does Haliburton become who he is if he is on the disfunctional Spurs this whole time?
Could Vassell be a good role player if he had been the 3rd option or lower his whole career?
Is Wemby being allowed to make terrible decisions and be a chucker and turn the ball over while trying stuff and “figuring it out” going to unleash a superstar who can do everything or will those bad habits follow him his entire career?
This is the great concern and also the great hope for the Spurs right now.
We finally have some talent and maybe even some structure that a rookie can come into.
We don’t have to rush our rookies, especially the 14th pick should we keep that.
Back to the excellent points about expectations “for better or worse” right?
Higher expectations can short circuit a mid career if they aren’t met.
But if a player embraces expectations they can unlock something they would t always have been able to achieve.
Wasn't there a rumor that the Spurs were trying to trade for that pick to get Wiseman or trade for Wiseman directly? Can't remember. What made him get the hype before that draft?
He played 3 games for Memphis U, and averaged 20/10/3 in 23 minutes. Supposedly, eligibility issues made him shut down for the year.
A small sample size like this blowing up on GS is why I’m out on Coward, and his 6 ing games played in the Mountain West conference.
Part of Wiseman’s issue was that GS was in the middle of a le run, and didn’t have time to develop him. Then, he got injured. Part of it was also that he wasn’t the most self motivated guy, either.
Not picking on ex here, but I think this is a good opportunity to point out something that should be obvious: there is no right or wrong answer to any of this.
Exstatic has build a player evaluation model in his mind where certain variables carry great weight - for example, FT% and number of games played and against what compe ion. Ex’s model is going to yield a certain outcome, and he might miss some players (like he’s admitted he missed on the Thompson twins). That’s actually completely fine. When you build a model, you have to be okay with the misses it will sometimes make, because no model will be perfect, but having a functional model is the way you build a board.
That relates back to this idea of “value” in that at the end of the day you just have to trust your model. Let’s take an extreme example - the Pelton model. Let’s say that this was your model (ignore for a moment the flaws for choosing this as your ranking model, since that’s not the intent of the Pelton model)… if you’re going to totally discount your model because it ranks guys ahead of their perceived value… then what it is the point of the model to begin with? At some point… you just have to trust your board.
My favorite illustration is this is the example where you have a single pick, say pick #14. Your favorite player there has been routinely mocked in the mid 20s, occasionally in the second round. You have no one willing to make a trade. What do you do? IMO, if your board says he is the best player, you just take him. Who cares if he might have been available in the second round… you don’t have a second round pick so it’s irrelevant. Just take the player you think is best.
Fans like to say things like “we should have traded down” but we have zero insight or knowledge into what trade opportunities are available. It’s not like you just hit “find trade” like you do in 2K and a list of options appears. You have a few minutes to make a move and sometimes they don’t materialize.
Now, if your model is consistently yielding Josh Primo at 12… you need to evaluate your model and why it is spitting out this answer.
A lot of my evaluations are driven by nerd analytics, sometimes going way back. I remember back in the day, Chad Ford opined that there were only two basketball skills that had a very high probability of going from one level of basketball up to the next level. Those two skills are shooting and rebounding. I’m also a big believer in shooting signal, that high FT% will lead to good jump shooting, even if it’s not apparent now. That came from both Dean on Draft and the TaT 3 point shooting projections. This is the reason that I’m high on Fears. Another past OU Freshman shot .238 on 3s, but shot 83.3% on FTs. He was not ranked going into college, started at a late age, and stayed 4 years. By his senior year, he shot .457 from long on nearly 9 attempts per game, and 88% on FTs on a little over 5 attempts per game. He is elite NBA one skill player Buddy Hield. Unfortunately for him, he was overdrafted at an advanced age (23) at #6 overall. He’s kept a job in the NBA, but bounced around a lot. Doesn’t matter where he lands, though. He’s always an elite 3 point shooter, gun for hire.
Also not a fan of small game sample sizes. You really don’t know what you’re getting.
Taking into account the other 29 teams, there is a draft slot for each player below which they will not fall. That slot is not completely knowable because the other teams’ draft boards are confidential, but it can be estimated through mock drafts.
A 14th pick is more valuable than a 28th pick. If a player would not be drafted by another team until 28th, and you draft him 14th, you leave that marginal value on the table. Maybe it’s not feasible to trade down for a less valuable pick to take the same player. Maybe a team doesn’t want to take the risk associated with not knowing for sure where that player otherwise would be drafted. But a good front office should be able to unlock that value in many cases.
Seems like the Spurs 14th overall pick (& 38th) vs Nets 19th and 28th picks is something we can grind on here as a discussion point. Are you locked onto a guy here (and if it isn't Sorber, why not?), or do you like a half dozen guys projected to be available at the 14th?
The thing with mock draft is that, for a lot of prospects, there isn't a consensus about their value. The same prospect can be viewed as a lottery pick by one scout and as a late first round pick by another one. Some prospect are polarizing because of an atypical playing style, lack of size, lack of athleticism, being extremely raw...
For the rest, I quite disagree. Saying "I like this player but not at #14" makes sense to me. It means that there are some players you find more interesting to be picked at #14 and/or you rather trade the pick than draft this player.
For example, a player I really like in this draft is Noah Penda, but I don't think Spurs should go after him at #14. He is just someone who plays the right way but he has his limitations (undersized for a PF and questionable shooting). Drafting players like Carter Bryant and Noa Essengue or trading #14 would be better than using this pick on Penda.
Well yes, at the end of the day, when you say "I like this player but not at #14" all you are really saying is "I have more than 14 other players ranked ahead of this guy".
You would rarely find yourself stacking up your board, having a player rated as the N-th best prospect and saying "too soon to pick him" - because by doing so you are inherently saying you are happier to take a lesser player sooner. The only justification would be a hypothetical situation like last year, where you have picks 4 and 8, and you are trying to game out the best combination of two picks and you think your Top player has a strong chance to be available with the later pick, but your next choice probably won't. This tends to be the case when drafts are long at one position and short at another.
If someone had taken Jokic at three, they'd have been laughed at. Would they be vindicated? Probably, but the reality remains that they still could have traded down several times and got him at 38.
That's what value is. I understand OP's point to a degree, but if you can get two twos for a one from people who are paying, then the value is a real thing, even if it's crazy.
The real rule of reaching is that you best not miss.
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