The Step Back 2020 NBA Draft Big Board: Updates, now that we actually know things
Anthony Edwards and Cole Anthony have separated themselves as the top players in the 2020 NBA Draft, plus other thoughts after the first month of college basketball.
The 2020 NBA Draft picture is starting to take shape. Six weeks into the NBA season, we know who a few of the teams who will be picking at the top of the draft are. The Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks, New Orleans Pelicans, Atlanta Hawks, and somehow, the Golden State Warriors, are our likely top five in lottery odds. Meanwhile, we’re a month into the college basketball season, which has helped us sort out who the players are that will be headed to those destinations.
The first month of the season is typically an enlightening one. Despite our best efforts, projecting a preseason ranking is often a futile exercise, as high school situations and the outrageous athleticism gap between elite prospects and their peers make figuring out which freshmen will hit tough, and it’s hard to predict who among the returners will surprise us with an unexpected development.
With a month of college data (and two months for international players), things start to come together, although it’s still far too early to make any legitimate claims about the strength of the class. Every year around this time, proclamations of how bad the year’s draft crop looks start to come up, only to go away once April comes around and we can properly put the class in context. Nevermind that this is almost always because at this point we’ve started to discard the players we thought would be good but have disappointed, but hesitate to truly promote the players we didn’t see coming. That creates a gaping hole in the second and third tiers of the board, hence the hand-wringing about class depth. Remember that at this point last year Bol Bol and Cam Reddish were popular top-five pick candidates still, and Jarrett Culver and Coby White were ranked in the 20s on most boards.
This year, the pattern re-emerges. Things look like they take a pretty steep drop-off after Anthony Edwards, but that may just be because preseason favorites like Deni Avdija have disappointed. It’s also probably too early to be too bullish on guys like Onyeka Okongwu and Aaron Nesmith, who both look on their way to the top 10 early on despite not really being on the radar for those spots heading into the year. As with every year, things will make a lot more sense in January.
The one theme we can expect, however, is that last year’s dichotomy between evaluations of players with demonstrable NBA traits and players with perceived potential is a continued confounding factor. Jackson Frank and I continue to lean on the side of the former compared to the latter, given how many times the former has actually led to real NBA success. That’s why you will see names that might be outside the mainstream (like Kira Lewis and Oscar Tshiebwe) in the lottery on our board, while names like James Wiseman and Jaden McDaniels sit much lower than their likely eventual draft spots.