RTOE: Our favorite NBA draft picks since 2011

It’s NBA draft season. Anyone can search prospects for the upcoming draft on June 23rd and find a wealth of information at their disposal; statistics, videos, analysis and anything else your basketball-loving heart desires. This roundtable isn’t that.

Some of the Upside & Motor team went deep into the bowels of our sadistic, irrational brains to discover our favorite draft pick in the last five years. It’s important to understand these are not meant to be the best picks by any means — but our favorite selections for reason unbeknownst even to ourselves in most cases.

Giannis Antetokounmpo: The Ultimate Franchise-Changer
By Cole Zwicker (@colezwicker)

Giannis checks all the boxes of the favorite pick criteria:

1)Pick Quality/Draft Philosophy: He personifies the “draft for ceiling star outcome and outlier physical tools over safe production” strategy when an athletic and feel floor is there.

The following is a list of star players selected outside the top 10 since 2011: Kawhi Leonard, Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green (Rudy Gobert and Steven Adams are more star level role players and it’s still too early to have great conviction in analyzing Devin Booker and Myles Turner).  Giannis is set up to join that elite company.

2)Film Aesthetics: He was an absolute delight to evaluate on DraftExpress videos at the time (with limited video available elsewhere), dominating 1980s video quality tape against what appeared to be a conglomerate of 8th graders in the Greek A2 league.

3)Human Component: He’s an incredibly humble human being and inarguably the champion of the people with his likability and epic tweets.

4)Franchise/City Changing Pick Magnitude: Most importantly, he completely reinvigorated basketball interest in the city of Milwaukee, quite possibly saved the franchise from relocating with said interest and seems hell-bent on leaving his legacy mark long-term in the city.  Listen, I lived in Milwaukee for 3 years, a land largely uninhabitable for 5 months of the year unless you have a weird fixation with freezing to death.  Giannis not only put that city back on the map in the NBA, but he WANTS to stay there.

In closing, Giannis is the GOAT, and I’ll hear nothing to the contrary.  Fear the Dear.  Fear the 6-11 Point Center Revolution. Fear the Smoothie. And God Bless Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Justin Anderson: Just Basically an Okay Pick
By Andrew Tobolowsky ( @andytobo)

To understand why Justin Anderson matters, you gotta understand the Mavericks. On one side of things, they’re always picking guys nobody’s ever heard of, even if it basically never works out — you can think of Roddy Beaubois, but there are a lot of other examples. Last year they seemed to draft a guy, Satnam Singh, literally just to sell journeys in India.

But in recent years, they’ve done a worse thing with better picks. They had the 17th pick in 2012 and the 13th in 2013, but they weren’t enamored with having those picks. As the league’s perpetual second lead in a romantic comedy, they were too consumed with pursuits of star FAs to worry about that kind of thing and somehow they kept coming up about a million dollars short. So, they kept trading down to picks that would save them the right amount of money. In 2013, this wasn’t a terrible thing. While they did trade the 17th pick, which became Tyler Zeller, to Cleveland, and then used the highest pick they got back on Jared Cunningham, and while they literally picked both of the guys who went before Draymond Green, Jae Crowder at least turned into quite a good player. Even if for someone else. But in 2013, they gave up the first lottery pick they’d had in a super long time to pick Shane Larkin at No. 18, missing out on, in the process, Kelly Olynyk, Shabazz Muhammad, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Dennis Schroder, to say nothing of whiffing on a bunch of guys who went later who would also have been way better.

Justin Anderson may or may not be an impact NBA player, some day. He at least seemed to key a big Mavs winning streak at the end of the season, and managed a very credible 9-4 line in his first ever playoff series. But none of that really matters. After so long picking either complete randos or shooting themselves in the foot, the Mavs, for the first time in years, stayed in the slot they got and picked someone another team might also have picked in their place. Way to go, Mavs! Way to go, JA!

Joel Embiid is a mythical figure at this point
By Chris Reichert (@Chris_Reichert)

The native of Cameroon was taken No. 3 overall in the 2014 draft and has yet to play a single solitary minute for the Philadelphia 76ers. It’s now 2016 and the hype makes it feel like he was just drafted and not a brand new toy who’s been hidden in a cupboard for two seasons.

Embiid is still on a pedestal as the savior to Philadelphia hoops and if — and that’s a huge if — he can stay healthy, there’s reason to hold firm in that belief. The lovable seven footer would have easily been the No. 1 pick in 2014 had he been 100 percent healthy and now the Sixers have the opportunity to pair him with another transcendent talent in Ben Simmons.

The Ringer’s Jonathan Tjarks wrote about Embiid in October of 2014 with supreme praise, “Embiid is the rare 7’0 who projects as an elite offensive player and an elite defensive player. In my mind, he’s the best big man prospect since Tim Duncan.” BEST SINCE TIM DUNCAN. It’s difficult to fathom another game-changing player with the skill level of Duncan entering the fray, but the prospect of Embiid being the anti-Duncan on the court with comparable skills on the court have vaulted him to levels of a mythical creature.

It’s easy to dismiss the talented 22-year old (yes, he’s still very young) due to some of his hilarious tweets, and his love for pitchers of Shirley Temples, but the Sixers love affair with the cellar of the NBA could take a hiatus once Embiid hits the court with his beautiful strides of excellence.

Andrew Wiggins isn’t “Maple Jordan” and that’s OK
By Chris Stone (@cstonehoops)

I’m a graduate of the University of Kansas and in the one-and-done era of college basketball, it’s been easy to get excited about the top-tier talents that commit each year (Hi, Josh!), but with only one season to make an impact it’s also more difficult for local communities to connect to one-and-dones like they do four year players. My favorite Jayhawk ever is Sherron Collins, a four-year guy who for various reasons never got much of a shot in the NBA. Collins had plenty of time to take his place in Kansas lore, but guys like Andrew Wiggins only had one season.

Wiggins was unique. Maybe it was his sheepish personality or the fact that he seemed like a genuinely good dude, but for some reason, Wiggins connected well with the Jayhawk faithful (It might also be that he was good enough at basketball to be featured on a Sports Illustrated cover in the same sentence as Wilt Chamberlain and Danny Manning).

Because of that connection, a couple of friends and I resolved to become fans of whatever NBA team drafted Wiggins. We were all “free agents” of a sort. Kansas doesn’t have an NBA team and we really liked Wiggins, a nice kid who failed to live up to unrealistic expectations and got battered by the national media for it (I’ll defend his freshman season over Jabari Parker’s to this day). We had high hopes for the young prospect some had called the “Maple Jordan,” and it was awkward watching Lebron push him out the door. Things have worked out, though. Wiggins is a key piece on one of most attractive up-and-coming franchises in the league and although he seems likely to end up playing second fiddle to Karl-Anthony Towns, he’s still our favorite. Even if he’s not the Maple Jordan.

Kentavious Caldwell-Pope: A Defense of Reaching for the Guy you Want
By Trevor Magnotti ( @Illegalscreens)

The 2013 NBA Draft was a bit of a crapshoot and was subsequently one of the harder drafts to assess in terms of prospect rankings. It seemed like there were three tiers: Guys who could go number one (Victor Oladipo, Cody Zeller, Nerlens Noel, etc.), mid-first round guys (Kelly Olynyk, Giannis Antetokounmpo), and everyone else. Located squarely in that second group, it appeared, was Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, the high-volume scorer from a bad Georgia team.

Caldwell-Pope was also one of the guys I was drawn to that year. He was viewed as an inefficient gunner, but he hit 37 percent from three on a volume of seven attempts per game, he was one of the best rebounding guards in the draft, and his defensive potential was through the roof due to his size, athleticism, and his understanding of defensive principles. If you got past the feeling that he took every shot for the Bulldogs that year, you could see an effective 3-and-D perimeter player. Detroit did just that, and took him 8th ahead of Trey Burke, a huge surprise at the time.

NBA teams routinely have differing opinions than draft experts do, and reaches happen every year. A reach is a bet on your own scouting, development, and team trajectory all aligning so that you get better value out of the guy you like than he is worth in a vacuum. So far, KCP has been exactly that. In the “incredibly weak” 2013 Draft, Caldwell-Pope has carved out a steady starter’s role on one of the up-and-coming teams in the league. He still relies on his jumper a bit too much, and his raw shooting numbers aren’t great (42/30/81 splits). But with his breakout defensive campaign this year, ability to take on an absurd minutes load, and excellent free throw shooting, KCP has established himself as a core player for Detroit.

Even though the Pistons’ management change was more of a factor in the Pistons getting to where they are, they still took a bet that they could get more out of KCP than guys rated higher than him, and so far they’ve done so. Caldwell-Pope’s story is a great example of taking chances in the draft, and how aiming for the guy you want can benefit you if you put the time in to make it work.