Now that the NBA Draft Lottery is over, we know where each team will pick in the 2013 NBA Draft. I thought I’d take this opportunity (before Arturo does) to get in a quick post about the top ranked NCAA basketball players.

Earlier this year we unveiled Wins Produced numbers for college basketball players. This model works for college just like it does for the NBA. Now, keep in mind that college performance does not predict NBA performance perfectly; this exercise simply shows how productive these players were in college last year. But players who are productive in college have a much better chance of being productive in the NBA.

When analyzing the table below, please also note the following:

• The numbers I’ve used below do not include games played in this year’s NCAA tournament. We will update this analysis in the future.
• Pay attention to our position assignment. This may not be the position the player will play in the NBA. And as these positions were assigned by an automated process (developed by Arturo Galletti), it also may not have been the position played in college. Position averages for ADJP40 are provided if you wish to calculate WP40 at different positions.

With that in mind, CBS Sports posted a mock draft on May 21st [Editor's note: CBS Sports has since updated their mock draft]. I decided to take the top 25 NCAA players from that mock draft and rank them by Wins Produced per 40 minutes (WP40). That means that this list does not necessarily include the top NCAA players in terms of wins or WP40; I’m simply re-ranking CBS Sports’ top 25 players by WP40.

Table 1: CBS Sports’ Top 25 NCAA Prospects (Ranked by Wins Produced per 40 minutes):

As you can see, these lists don’t agree perfectly. For example, Jeff Withey is ranked 5th among these players in terms of WP40, but only ranks 24th in CBS Sports’ mock draft. And Shabazz Muhammad is ranked 23rd in WP40, but 10th in the mock draft. But the player ranked #1 by CBS did post the best WP40 of these 25 players.

As promised, if you want to re-calculate a player’s WP40 for a different position, here are the ADJP40 averages by position:

• PG: 0.309
• SG: 0.329
• SF: 0.351
• PF: 0.384
• C: 0.406

- DJ and Devin

UPDATE: Just a quick note (from DJ)… I would emphasize that I do not regard the WP40 ranking as a ranking of who will be the best NBA players.  This is simply an analysis of what each player did last year in college.  Again, there is a correlation between college and the NBA. But as anyone who has looked at the numbers understands, it is not perfect.

Will LeBron James and Tim Duncan meet in the 2013 NBA Finals like they did in 2007?

Our contest participants were much better at predicting second round outcomes than they were at predicting first round outcomes (and we’ll have more on that at the end of the playoffs). How will they fare in the Conference Finals? In graphical form, here is how the entries for the third round of the Wages of Wins NBA Playoffs contest look:

Eastern Conference Finals

Miami Heat (#1) vs Indiana Pacers (#3)

The Pacers advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals even though a majority of our second round entries favoured the Knicks. While our participants viewed that series as being rather close — a 55-45 split is not very decisive — this series has a very clear favourite. Out of 67 entries, only three think that the Pacers will win; about 80% of participants believe that the Heat will win in five (40%) or six (39%) games. Our participants were twice as likely to pick a Heat sweep as they were to pick the Pacers winning in any amount of games. It’s safe to say that if the Pacers win, it will be an unexpected outcome.

Western Conference Finals

San Antonio Spurs (#2) vs Memphis Grizzlies (#5)

While only 40% of first round participants thought the Grizzlies would beat the Clippers, 56% of second round participants thought they would upset the Thunder. Did our third round participants complete the jump onto the ‘Grit ‘n’ Grind’ bandwagon? Not exactly. Only 36% of participants think that the Grizzlies will beat the Spurs; 33% believe that the Spurs will win in 7 games, 28% believe the Spurs will win in 6 games, and 25% believe the Grizzlies will win in 6 games. However, all but two participants believe that the series will last six or seven games (that’s 97%), so people aren’t expecting it to be over that quickly. Who would you pick in a drawn out series between the Defensive Player of the Year and one of the league’s top players?

Reminder: once the Conference Finals are finished, we’ll be posting the cumulative leaders and let you make your picks for the NBA Finals, so keep checking back!

- Devin

Just what is a draft pick worth?

It’s surprising that I haven’t actually written this piece before. Long-time readers know that the draft is old and fertile ground for me (see here for a good example). Now, typically I need no prompting to start writing about the draft but in this particular case you can blame squarely at the feet of my partner in crime Andres Alvarez and Truehoop Smackdown champion Benjamin Morris.

The impetus was two-fold:

• Andres Alvarez (@NerdNumbers) for asking the following on Twitter: “Opinion question. Does getting the #1 Pick in the Draft Lottery really up your odds at a title?”
• Ben for writing a nice piece in response (see here, seriously, go read it).

Ben’s finding is that yes, it does matter. This spurred my curiosity. Let’s just say inspiration hit like a sledgehammer.

Or like this

I dug out some data sets and confirmed that I do agree with Ben. The devil though is in the details. Which of course, I then spent a significant amount of time working out.

The key point in drafting right and knowing when to trade is knowing the value of the asset at hand (i.e. the draft pick). This led me to the question of the actual value of the pick and the idea that we can figure this out.

All I need to do is:

1. Estimate the value of a win to $1.7 million dollars (approximately the number of wins in a season divided by the the total payroll).
2. Work out the average number of wins produced by draft picks over their first four years in the league (their rookie contract).
3. Sprinkle in the Rookie salary.

We can come up with an actual pick value chart. The data looks like so:

And as a graph it looks like so:

And for those lazy readers out there, I can convert this to a relative pick value chart:

With that, now you too can run an NBA draft for your favorite team!

The second part of the equation is the premise that you need high draft picks to win the title. I decided that it would be fun to look at this visually by charting the draft pedigree of all the NBA Finalists since 1978. An important note: I also decided that, to actually count for a team, the player had to crack the Top 6 in the rotation for said team (this is from my Half Baked Notion about the playoffs).

This breaks down like so:

Turns out that Miami-Dallas — bouts one and two — have been the most loaded finals (in terms of top draft picks) since 1991 Bulls-Lakers.

That’s not the poster though.

This is:

[Editor Dre's Note: The Poster is Really beautiful but it's also quite large. So rather than have you scroll a ton I figure it's easier if you click here for it!]

Draft Pedigree of top 6 Players in each Finals

All business in the front and party in the back. Keep a lookout for more.

-Arturo

The Spurs’ best player, along with Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and Tim Duncan

Over at Grantland, Andrew Sharp has written an article lamenting the fact that the Spurs were able to get a player as good as Kawhi Leonard with the 15th pick. Sharp, who is a Wizards’ fan (my condolences), has the following to say about watching Kawhi Leonard play:

Rooting for a perpetually hopeless franchise will drive you insane for a number of reasons. You know this. But you know when it gets really bad? The playoffs, when you have to watch players your team passed up dominate on another team.

Kawhi Leonard has been a very productive player during his short time in the league. A quick look at his stats on the NBA Geek gives us the following numbers:

He lead all rookies in total wins during his first year. This year — in relatively fewer minutes — he ranked third among second year players in total wins (although it should be noted that he posted the highest per-minute efficiency in that group). He’s also leading the Spurs in wins during the 2013 NBA playoffs. How could the Spurs — who, due to their consistent regular season success, typically draft in the the 25-30 range — get their hands on such a productive young player?

First, let’s talk about how Leonard was drafted. Leonard was taken with the 15th pick in the 2011 NBA Draft. However, many might forget that it was actually the Indiana Pacers who drafted him. The Spurs acquired him by trading George Hill to the Pacers. So not only did 12 teams take a pass on Leonard (both the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Utah Jazz had two picks in the top 14), but Leonard was obviously available to be had for the right price. Which means that it’s possible that more than 12 teams could have had a shot at acquiring Leonard. Why didn’t other teams try to acquire him?

Because other teams didn’t think he would be a good player. Coming into the 2011 draft, Leonard was not too highly regarded due to the fact that he didn’t score that many points. In his two years of NCAA basketball, Leonard averaged 12.7 and 15.5 points per game (PPG) — a far cry from highly touted prospects like Kemba Walker (23.5 PPG) and Jimmer Fredette (28.9 PPG), who were drafted ahead of him. Since NBA decision makers and fans consistently rely on points to evaluate basketball players, Leonard appeared to be nothing but a mid-first round pick.

But had these teams looked at more than Leonard’s scoring, they would have seen a player who was likely to succeed in the NBA. In June of 2011, our own Arturo Galletti examined all of the 2011 NBA draft prospects with NCAA experience and ranked Leonard third. The only players ahead of Leonard in Arturo’s rankings were Kyrie Irving and Kenneth Faried. While Irving was the consensus #1, Faried — like Leonard — was also not very highly regarded, and was taken by the Nuggets with the #22 pick. Sixteen teams had a chance at drafting Faried, but decided to pass.

And that brings us to the important point: most NBA teams are bad at drafting. Players like Leonard and Faried frequently last past the middle of the first round. Charlotte, Cleveland, Minnesota, Utah, and Washington all had the opportunity to acquire Leonard and Faried in that draft. Had these teams been looking at the right stats, these decisions would have been obvious. Instead, these teams focused more on the wrong stats — like points and how much weight a player can bench press — and on subjective qualities like “length”, “upside”, “motor”, and flashy shot-making.

Unlike many teams, the Spurs have consistently shown that they know what they’re doing when it comes to drafting. So I disagree as strongly as possible with what Sharp wrote immediately following the quote at the top of this page:

It gets REALLY bad when you watch someone like Kawhi Leonard dominating for the Spurs and realize that this never would’ve happened if he’d landed with your team….It’s knowing that if Veseley had been the one who was drafted by the Spurs, he’d probably turn into a weapon for years to come, and if Leonard went to the Wizards, he’d probably turn into an über-athletic wing with limited skills who becomes indistinguishable from about 50 other wing players in the NBA.

Yes, it gets really bad, but not because Leonard wouldn’t have become a good player on the Wizards, Cavaliers, Timberwolves, or any other traditionally bottom-feeding NBA team. It gets really bad when you realize that, not only was it possible to recognize that Leonard (or Faried) was a very good NBA prospect, but that it was so very easy to recognize. All you had to do was examine publicly available data from his time in the NCAA. Fans of perpetually losing NBA teams should be upset every time they see players like Kawhi Leonard and Kenneth Faried step out onto the court, and they should be asking themselves why their favourite teams keep missing on these players.

- Devin

Over at 3 Shades of Blue, the Memphis Grizzlies’ blog in the TrueHoop Network, Dave Berri has written a post about the Grizzlies and their rather improbable run into the Western Conference Finals. In it he provides Playoff Wins Produced numbers for the rosters of the Clippers, Thunder, Warriors, Spurs, and the Grizzlies. He also talks about how small sample sizes can affect the results of a seven game series, highlighted by one of his favourite quotes from Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (p. 70-71):

…if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups. There is really no way for a sports league to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time. And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed! So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned “world champion” is not a reliable indication that a team is actually the best one.

The post is almost 2000 words, so there is certainly a lot more to read in the article. And you don’t want to miss Dave’s prediction on the outcome of the Western Conference finals:

And finally, although I have made it clear that small samples make predicting difficult in the playoffs, I suspect Chip will insist I make some sort of prediction. Given the primary readers in this forum, that prediction should be designed to make fans of the Grizzlies happy.

Sports fans – when faced with outcomes where randomness plays a role – tend to fall for superstitions. And these superstitions often take the form of the sports fan trying to repeat whatever happened before something good happened in the past (i.e. wearing a lucky hat, sitting in a lucky seat, etc…). With that in mind, I will make a pick that I think will clearly ensure success for Memphis.

Go over to 3 Shades of Blue to get the complete prediction!

- Devin