The NBA Draft: All Picks Matter
Image: Sporting News Australia
It's a big part of the NBA, but is there too much emphasis on players being taken early on in the Draft?
The NBA Draft is a brilliant way of evenly and fairly distributing new players throughout the league, as well as preventing the teams with the most money buying up all the best young talent. On Draft Night, we all sit in anticipation as to which player is joining which team, and, most importantly, who is going to be the number one pick?
Being selected first overall is considered the biggest distinction for a brand new recruit, that you are the most wanted of hundreds of players who entered the draft, and who wouldn’t want to join such esteemed company as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson and Hakeem Olajuwon?
That being said, the number one pick will also be joining the ranks of players who didn’t quite change the game as those aforementioned did. Some didn’t live up to the hype of being chosen first overall (Kenyon Martin, Michael Olowokandi), while some suffered from persistent injury (Greg Oden, Pervis Ellison) and others from disastrous careers (Kwame Brown).
Every player wants to be drafted in the first round, what comes next is considered something of a graveyard. While it’s true that a majority of second-round picks never even play in the NBA, a lot of talent has emerged from beyond the first round, showing it’s far from the basketball wilderness it’s thought to be.
Dennis Rodman was drafted in the second round, and he went on to be one of best defensive players the game has ever seen. Mark Price, Manu Ginobili, Draymond Green and Isaiah Thomas are but a few second round picks who have had, or continue to have, successful careers in the NBA. Bruce Bowen and Ben Wallace both went undrafted, but the Spurs and Pistons took a chance on each of them and they went on to be two of the NBA’s biggest stars and most feared players of the early 2000s. Half a dozen examples is probably not be the most incontrovertible evidence, but it does show where a player is taken in the draft is not necessarily an indicator of their talent.
The internet is awash with revisionist articles which look back on drafts of the past and how each team should have chosen. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to say that the Trail Blazers should have chosen Michael Jordan over Sam Bowie, or scoff at the Pistons for going with Darko Milicic when they could have had either Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh or Dwyane Wade. The thing is, at the time, they thought they were making the right decision. No none could have known precisely the mark Jordan was about to leave on the game, or the lack of one that would be left by Milicic, and this begs another question - would the career of a player like Jordan have been exactly the same if they started out with a different team?
When a 'rising star' of basketball first joins the professional ranks there are some things their first team just can not predict about them: Is the club culture and management style the best fit for them? How quickly will they be able to adapt to playing at this new level? These very individual reactions are things their college stats can’t really say about them.
A team can read all the scouting reports and hold as many try outs as they like, but in the end, when it comes to choosing a player for the draft, what they are doing more than anything is guessing. They can't know for certain who they are going to choose will be a genius on the court, all they can do is go with who looks like the best prospect and hope they transform when they take to the court.
Recent number one picks like Anthony Davis, Ben Simmons and Karl-Anthony Towns have taken to the league like the proverbial fowl to the proverbial liquid, but they are an elite bunch. They are hugely talented, yes, but they have also worked hard their whole lives to reach the NBA, carried along by an unwavering belief that it is the place where they belong. If a player is even a fraction off from that belief and work ethic, their career path at basketball’s highest level is going to be all the more bumpy.
We’ve seen this as recently as 2013, when the Cleveland Cavaliers, unexepectedly, selected Anthony Bennett with the number one overall pick. Bennett had an underwhelming spell in the NBA; while he did prove himself a decent rebounder, he never managed to average more than 10 points per game in a single season. He played for four NBA teams, never for any more than a year, before falling out of the league and going on to play in Turkey and the G-League after that. When Bennett was released by the Raptors in 2016, coaches cited his inability to grasp the demands of an NBA career as one of the biggest reasons why.
It's easy to see how making the jump from college basketball to the sport's elite platform would be a shock to the system for some players. You can't really know about the sacrifices that need to be made, the higher standards that have to be met and the pressures you will be playing under are like until you've experienced them first-hand. Bennett wasn’t the first who couldn’t live up to NBA standards, and he certainly won’t be the last.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise if and when one of this year’s top picks doesn’t turn out to be the superstar of basketball everyone hoped they would be. While the Draft is still a brilliantly implemented system, in essence it is a big guessing game which gives no guarantee how the career of any draft selectee is going to turn out. Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge the top draft picks, and instead be congratulatory they have been given a chance by an NBA team - and then see what they make of it.
