ESPN’s Chad Ford accused of changing old mock drafts

Jun 27, 2013; Brooklyn, NY, USA; Giannis Antetokounmpo poses for a photo with NBA commissioner David Stern after being selected as the number fifteen overall pick to the Milwaukee Bucks during the 2013 NBA Draft at the Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports

Mock drafts are, at best, an inexact science and, at worst, a complete shot in the dark. But NBA draft “expert” Chad Ford is accused of altering his old mocks well after the fact.

Hindsight is, in fact, 20-20 — or so it appears to be in the case of ESPN NBA Draft “expert” Chad Ford.

Ford, who has long worked as ESPN’s NBA version of Mel Kiper, was discovered by users on Reddit, beginning with sharpinator—who found inconsistencies in old versions of Ford’s 2013 NBA mock draft and what was currently posted on the site—and expanding from there to bring into question every one of Ford’s mocks since 2008.

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Deadspin later confirmed those suspicions, finding changes in mock draft pages back to 2009.

According to Deadspin, as well as the crafty Redactor, the changes Ford made to his previous mock drafts were rampant.

In 2009, James Harden was moved from No. 6 to No. 3, Jrue Holiday from No. 8 to No. 7, DeMar DeRozan from No. 10 to No. 8 and Ty Lawson from No. 15 to No. 11. Meanwhile, Hasheem Thabeet, Jonny Flynn, Eric Maynor and Austin Daye were moved down.

Deadspin reckons those changes were made between Feb. 8 and April 27, 2012.

The 2011 mock was changed sometime between Oct. 9, 2012, and June 14, 2013, and included Iman Shumpert arriving from out of nowhere to be ranked in the top 20.

Ford’s 2012 mock draft—edited at some point from Aug. 31, 2012, to March 28, 2013—dropped Austin Rivers off the board completely and Kendall Marshall fell out of the top 20, replaced by Tyler Zeller and Maurice Harkless.

Finally, his 2013 mock draft appears to have been edited within the last three months to move Giannis Antetokounmpo from No. 17 to No. 9, with Jamaal Franklin, Shane Larkin, Sergey Karasev and Lucas Nogueira disappearing from the top 20 to be replaced by Gorgui Dieng, Tim Hardaway Jr., Mason Plumlee and Rudy Gobert.

But the mess gets bigger and better—within hours of Deadspin’s post documenting the changed mocks, they were amazingly reverted to their original versions.

I seldom put a lot of stock in mock drafts, for the simple fact that in terms of actual accuracy, they are blown up at the moment a draft pick is traded from one team to another, because these picks are not one-size-fits-all.

So the value in going back and revising old mocks is valuable only as a sop to the ego and to be able to proudly point at them and say, “See? I was on (insert overachiever’s name here) before anyone else knew who he was!”

And, apparently, it didn’t bother Ford at all to be lying his a** off while making those claims.

Particularly egregious is his dramatic move with Antetokounmpo. The Milwaukee Bucks were widely criticized for reaching to take the Greek Freak at No. 15 overall, because hardly anyone had him rated that high.

But now we discover that Antetokounmpo was ranked No. 9 by that idiot savant of the NBA draft (heavy emphasis on the “idiot” part) himself, Chad Ford.

For anyone who doesn’t think this is a thing, it’s akin to plagiarizing—only in this case he is a time-traveling plagiarist.

He’s going to the future and using actual events to change past predictions to look better in the present. (Yeah, that gave me a little bit of a headache, too. It’s OK. Deep breaths.)

The fact the mocks were changed back to their original form means that someone in the hierarchy at ESPN knows there’s an issue.

Now it’s just a question of whether posting the uncorrected versions is part of an effort to sweep the thing under the rug or whether Chad Ford gets broomed out of the flagship at Bristol, Conn.

The lesson here—as always: Someone is always watching. So just own it and get over it.

[H/T The Big Lead]

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