NBA Draft and finding “Best Player Available”

Finding and evaluating talent is arguably the hardest thing for any front office personnel executive to do. Having to assess still developing athletes and projecting their futures is an uphill task for the most adept scout, even with the deluge of information currently available to the masses.

The NBA is often viewed as the easiest of the four professional sports to select talent that will eventually blossom, due to the removal of high school players from the talent pool and the ability for 1-2 players to dominate a game making it easier to evaluate who is “good” and who is not. But given the “assumed” ease with which NBA teams are able to acquire talent at the top of the NBA Draft, how often do teams actually select the “Best Player Available”?

In this context, “Best Player Available” is referring to how often the No. 1 selection ends up being the best player in that draft. Another way of looking at it is, how many picks does it take for the best player to be selected? And then how many picks does it take for the second-best player to be selected?  To assess the accuracy of general managers or personnel directors making the draft selections, we will use career Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) as the measurement tool and we will be looking solely at lottery picks from 2001-2015.

By their very nature, as drafts progress, the talent pool gradually thins out and it becomes increasingly difficult to assess players for their NBA potential, but after looking at these numbers, it’s clear, there remains difficult at the top.

Over the last 15 NBA Drafts, only 17 lottery picks, or a little over one per year, were the best player available in the context of career VORP. LeBron James and Karl-Anthony Towns are the only two players that were the BPA at No. 1 while Kevin Durant was the only BPA taken at No. 2.

There are extraneous circumstances such as fit with the team drafting, career development timeline, development protocol in place to maximize each player’s potential within that particular organization, etc but in a vacuum, the struggles in identifying the best player available is real, even at the top of the draft. Only 8.7 percent of lottery picks in a 15-year span were the best players available at that spot.

There is even some noise in these numbers to take into account. Given the small sample size for the 2015 draftees, their numbers are a tad skewed toward the top since the initial investment in these players often necessitates playing time quicker than others. Taking the 2015 players out of the equation, the percent of best player available picks is reduced to 7.1 percent.

The struggle in identifying talent is magnified even further when looking at the next best player available selection in the draft.

There are four drafts where the first BPA selection wasn’t made until after the lottery and two years where the first BPA wasn’t until the second round. Most glaring of all in my eyes is that the average gap between best player available picks is 15.2 selections, including a 46 pick gap between Durant and Marc Gasol in 2007.

In summary, the NBA Draft is not an exact science, even when a team doesn’t care about fit and is just trying to maximize talent.