The worst NBA Draft picks for every team

Every NBA team has had their share of draft misses. Figuring out which was the worst for each is tough. Ordering those misses was almost impossible. Almost.

When our editor pitched a bunch of offseason story ideas, as a Knicks fan, this one naturally stood out. For much of the last two decades, schadenfreude is all I’ve had, and there’s no easier way to revel in the misfortune of others than by looking at past drafts.

(Yes, even when your team has traded away its selection)

More than that even, I thought it would be a nice challenge. Anyone can look at a team’s old mistakes and pinpoint the duds, but that alone doesn’t make a pick bad; there also needs to be an opportunity cost associated with the mistake.

Using my own team as an example, the selection of Mike Sweetney at ninth in 2003 was laughably terrible the moment Commissioner Stern read his name, but was it their worst pick ever? Not even close.

For starters, it’s not like there were any other reasonable alternatives. Is Jarvis Hayes still keeping Knick fans up at night? What about Mickael Pietrus? Marcus Banks, perhaps? You have to go all the way down to David West at No. 18 to find a player who did anything of note, which opens up a new problem: who gets the brunt of the criticism for passing on him?

Is it the Suns, who had the pick immediately before New Orleans and instead took the immortal Zarko Cabarkapa? Should it be the Celtics for taking Troy Brown one pick earlier, who had fewer career points and minutes than any other first rounder that year but was also used to obtain Kendrick Perkins later that night? Hell, should we blame the Pistons, who had a glaring hole at power forward that they eventually filled with Rasheed Wallace, but that they were hoping would eventually be occupied by the skinny Serbian they took second – one who a few people surmised at the time should have gone ahead of LeBron James?

These rabbit holes can go on for miles if you let them, so before we get into this, a few ground rules:

• Reasonable expectations at the time matter. Sure, David West ended up far better than Darko Milicic, but in no world was West ever going second;
• By the same token, someone else far better needed to be available with the pick that the team blew;
• Draft position matters. Expecting the Heat to select Russ over Michael Beasley at two is one thing; blaming the Warriors for taking Tim Young over Manu Ginobli at 56 is another;
• If a team’s pick underperformed because of injury, they’ll be judged less harshly than if the guy just stunk;
• All else being equal, the team with the pick immediately before a future star got drafted will be the one mentioned here;
• Bonus negative points if a team bypassed an obvious choice that ended up as the far superior player;
• If a team drafted a player but traded their rights before they ever put on the uniform, that move is eligible to appear here but won’t carry quite as much weight;
• Because of the amount of franchise movement, if a team changed locations, we won’t carry over their draft mistakes with them (i.e., the Thunder won’t be blamed for the sins of Seattle)

Lastly, our analysis here begins in 1966, the year the NBA did away with the old territorial draft rules that gave organizations priority in drafting players that went to college within 50 miles of the team’s home (otherwise the Pistons would be getting all kinds of hell for taking the immortal Bill Bunton ahead of future MVP Rick Barry).

With that, let’s get to it. Huge thanks to BasketballReference.com for all the free research they allowed me to do for this article. We’ll start from the least egregious errors and work our way up to the worst ones, culminating in a top ten that are in a class by themselves. Avert your eyes…