“With the fourth pick of the 2010 NBA Draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves select… Wesley Johnson of Syracuse University.”

David Stern’s words made it official. The Minnesota Timberwolves had drafted Johnson, the reigning Big East Player of the Year and a consensus All-American. Every major mock draft outlet had the Wolves taking Johnson, the hyper-athletic forward who had been a weed whacker in Syracuse’ zone defense. After hitting on Kevin Love in 2008 and getting a respectable rookie season from Jonny Flynn in 2009, they needed a wing to complement the foundational big and point guard. With Johnson, the Wolves got their guy.

But what if the guy they really wanted went six picks later?

Welcome to the “most unbelievable groupthink project on earth.”

I stumbled into this project by way of listening to the Ringer NBA Show in March. The hosts, Chris Vernon and Kevin O’Connor, were discussing the idea that all the major mock draft outlets are similar year after year, despite being wrong year after year.

“We know the draft has not been the beacon of efficiency. There’s busts like every year that are drafted in the top five to ten guys. And yet almost every mock that you can find mirrors each other. Nobody really has much radically different. I was stunned by this and so I’ve been asking around to people about it. Like how can this be the most unbelievable group think project on earth? How can everybody’s board look the same, or close to?” said Vernon.

I agreed with his line of questioning. I’ve feasted on mock draft content each year since I can remember, and each year I allow myself to be stunned when they get things incorrect. But then Vernon supplied an answer to his own question.

“And [an] agent told me, this was his philosophy, that these mocks come out, and then obviously there’s a lot of, I don’t want to say copying but there’s a baseline for it. And then people can inject their information and or opinions into those mock drafts… Because if you make a mistake and you take a guy that everybody in the free world agrees upon is elite and is supposed to be drafted where conventional wisdom or at least whatever the wisdom of the mockery drafts are that you won’t get fired over that, right? Because every owner has access to [mock drafts], every GM, every fan, every everything.”

“But if you have your own opinion, and you go out there and you say the hell with what the mock drafts say, the hell with that. I’m taking the guy that I think is the best, that then you put yourself at risk,” continued Vernon.

What a concept! Publicly available mock drafts made by people without direct affiliations to players or agents or teams were dictating the choices of decision-makers in the NBA. I was taken aback by this suggestion, and it is the basis for this project.

O’Connor only added fuel to the fire, saying that he had bought into a theory that the Timberwolves had done exactly that eight years ago.

“In the 2010 draft [the Timberwolves] had the hots for Paul George who ended up going 10th to Indiana. And they really, really wanted to take him with the fourth pick but because of the fact that George, seemingly the consensus amongst whether it was public whether it’s internally whether it’s with other NBA teams, most people thought of Wesley Johnson as a better prospect so they didn’t go with their gut and take Paul George, the guy that they ultimately felt was actually the right guy.”

You could dismiss some of this as hearsay, but Vernon has covered the Memphis Grizzlies for 17 years and O’Connor is nothing if not connected in league circles.

Not only that, but consider the context of the Johnson/George anecdote. David Kahn was hired as the Timberwolves’ president of basketball operations on May 22, 2009. A month later, he drafted point guards Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn 5th and 6th overall.

Rubio wouldn’t play with the Wolves until 2011. And despite Flynn’s initial promise, he finished fifth in the Rookie of the Year voting that season, behind four players who played Flynn’s same position (Tyreke Evans, 4th overall, Stephen Curry, 7th, Brandon Jennings, 10th, and Darren Collison, 21st).

Going off-script in 2009 provided an early strike on Kahn’s resume. It would make sense that heading into the draft the next season, Kahn was in need of a win, and playing it safe with Johnson would provide that.

Johnson and George were each Second Team All-Rookie in 2010-11, but all questions about George’s potential as a prospect were answered after he excelled in a limited role with Indiana his rookie season.

Heading into 2011, how would back-to-back draft blunders impact the Wolves’ decision-making?

Kahn provided some insight into the 2011 war room in an interview with the Minnesota Tribune on May 3, 2013, the day he was fired.

“The 2011 draft, I think there would have been bonfires and pitchforks in front of my office if we hadn’t taken Derrick Williams. I just recall coming into that draft, you just had to do it, even though we were deep at that position. And I think you could also make an argument he really was the right pick. In time, I think it will prove to be the right pick. Derrick’s very young though and people tend to be impatient. I think Derrick’s on course to be a very fine player in this league,” revealed Kahn.

Notice that pitchforks, and not Williams’ strengths as a player, were the primary motivation! The attack on Frankenstein’s monster scene goes to show that PR can motivate a front office.

Despite being “safe” in the moment, the repercussions of those sorts of moves can be devastating. Love, Rubio, and George may have become a Western Conference powerhouse. Instead, the Wolves traded Johnson after two seasons for three second round picks.

Granted, Kahn was lambasted by the Bill Simmons’ of the world throughout his tenure and will be long afterwards. He may join Ted Stepien on the Mount Rushmore of Bad GM’s someday. But the theory that taking a player to appease a fanbase rather than to best benefit a team has some steam.

Let’s dig into it.

Process

I knew I couldn’t prove intent. I couldn’t catch teams admitting that they base their decisions on internet mock drafts. But I could at least learn what happens when teams buck consensus.

I decided to look back at mock drafts year over year and compare them to actual drafts to see the variance between public consensus and actuality.

But which mock drafts? A quick google search nets upwards of 50 different mocks for the 2018 Draft. The proliferation of mockery is a product of the demand for more guesses as to how your favorite team can fix its woes. Howard “What Up” Beck profiled three forefathers of internet mock drafting, Chad Ford (ESPN), Aran Smith (NBADraft.net) and Jonathan Givony (DraftExpress), in this 2009 piece for the New York Times. They each shared the sentiment that mock drafting is a fruitless exercise, but that they do it primarily because people want to see them.

Ford, Smith, and Givony’s consistency, influence, and roots to the early days of mocking were why I used their mocks as the basis for my research. DraftExpress was the last of the three chosen outlets to get started (2004), but the internet was a rickety old barn compared to what it is now, so the first accessible DraftExpress mock came in 2005. And so it began.

I logged every NBADraft.net, ESPN, and DraftExpress mock draft from 2005 to 2013, in addition to the actual drafts from those years. This was an incredible lesson in basketball history, and led to the discovery of such exquisite names as Lior Eliyahu, Martynas Andriuškevičius, and Yotam Halperin, who were either slated to be drafted in the NBA or were actually drafted and immediately forgotten.

The data stopped at 2013 at the behest of the great Kevin Pelton, who graciously replied to my email about this project to give some pointers on how to get started with this research. Reaching out to and then getting the advice from Pelton was basically this GIF:

Before Pelton’s advice, I was concerned that this analysis would only be able to capture the difference between picks, rather than the difference between the value of the picks. A player being slated to be selected 55th overall being selected 60th is much different than if a player who was supposed to be selected 5th actually is selected 10th. Pelton suggested that I use his fantastic Draft Value (ESPN Insider) chart to capture the weight of each pick. The chart is like the genius grandson of Jimmy Johnson’s famed NFL Draft value chart, used to assign a value to each draft pick for the purposes of trading picks.

Therefore, our x-axis was determined by this formula:



(Player’s Actual Draft Value) – (Mean (ESPN Mock Draft Value, DraftExpress Mock Draft Value, NBADraft.net Mock Draft Value)

If a player’s x-value was positive, that player was picked higher in the draft than mocks had them going.

For example: The Seattle Sonics infamously selected Mohamed Saer Sene 10th overall (a draft value of 1720) in 2006. ESPN and DraftExpress had Sene going 14th overall (draft value of 1320), while NBADraft.net had him going 18th (1080). The mock value average was 1240, and so his x-value is 1720-1240 = 480.

If a player’s x-value was negative, that player slid further in the draft than mocks had them going.



For example: The New Jersey Nets selected Brook Lopez 10th overall (a draft value of 1720) in 2008. ESPN and NBADraft.net had Lopez going 4th overall (draft value of 2410), while DraftExpress had him going 8th (1830). The mock value average was 2216.67, and so his x-value is 1720 – 2216.67 = -496.67.

Now the question was how to quantify player value to see how these decisions to buck convention or to follow consensus worked out. Again, I followed a Pelton instruction here to use VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) to quantify each drafted player’s value.



Basketball Reference defines VORP as: A box score estimate of the points per 100 team possessions that a player contributed above a replacement level (-2) player, translated to an average team and prorated to an 82 game season.

Basically: How many points better is this player than an average player over the course of each 100 possession game in an 82 game season.

Pelton suggested using a player’s VORP from their first five years, because those first five years are all that a team is guaranteed to control a player’s rights (four-year rookie contract plus a one-year qualifying offer). Since the point of this exercise is to see what happens when teams buck convention, it made sense to focus this on how much value a team was expected to gain. Five years of value also meant that the research window was from 2005 to 2013, since a player drafted in 2014 will have their fifth season in the 2018-19 NBA season.

VORP accumulates after each season, making it perfect for encapsulating a player’s cumulative impact over a given period.

But using players’ VORP straight up would simply evaluate how good the player that was drafted was, rather than how good the pick was. The VORP needed some context, so I calculated an expected VORP for each pick (1-60), and judged a player’s VORP against that expectation. So the y-axis is a player’s actual VORP after five seasons minus the expected VORP of a player chosen at that slot.

Spencer Hawes was picked 10th in 2007. He had a VORP of 1.5 after five seasons, and the expected 5 season VORP of a player selected 10th in this sample is 3.655. Therefore, Hawes’ y-value is -2.155.

Houston, we have a graph.

Below are the the results. Hover over each circle to see which player it represents, the year they were drafted, their position, their actual draft value minus their mock draft consensus value, and their Actual – Expected VORP after their first five seasons. I’d embed it but WordPress and Tableau don’t play nicely. Enjoy!

Play with the data here.

Some takeaways:

My god Chris Paul was awesome. His five-year VORP of 31.2 is 6th all-time behind Michael Jordan (41.4), David Robinson (39.9), LeBron James (39.1), Charles Barkley (36.2), Larry Bird (32.8).

You’ll find a huge cluster towards the origin, which indicates both a large cluster of players being drafted near their conventional slot and also a large cluster of players who have very average or non-existent NBA careers.

The five biggest overachievers relative to their pick from 2005 have been Chris Paul, Marc Gasol, Kawhi Leonard, Draymond Green, and Giannis Antetokounmpo.

The five biggest “risers” during this period are Anthony Bennett (1st, 2013), Renaldo Balkman (20th, 2006), Cody Zeller (4th, 2013), Andrew Bynum (10th, 2005), and Nate Robinson (21st, 2005). Anthony Bennett’s selection in 2013 is a true anomaly unlike anything we’ve seen in the mock draft era.

The five biggest “fallers” during this period are Nerlens Noel (6th, 2013), Gerald Green (18th, 2005), Alex Len (5th, 2013), Danny Granger (17th, 2005), and DeJuan Blair (37th, 2009).

It’s fun to look at the buckshots of how teams have drafted over the years with the team filter. For example, look how narrow and relatively the Orlando Magic’s picks were compared to how wide and fairly prosperous the Portland Trailblazers’ picks have been over the nine drafts.

Conclusions

A regression analysis on this data found almost zero correlation between when a player was drafted relative to expectations and their performance. I doubt that would change with a larger sample size in the future. There are a fair amount of sentiments expressing the randomness of the draft. Look no further than the Boston Celtics, current darlings of draftdom, who appear to have this craft down to a science after drafting Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Terry Rozier over the last three drafts. Meanwhile, they’ve also selected Guerschon Yabusele, R.J. Hunter, and Jordan Mickey in the first 33 picks over the same period.

From a decision-making standpoint, the data shows that there is no reason to deeply consider consensus when selecting a player early in the draft. Everyone had Jimmer Fredette exactly where he was selected. Same goes for Acie Law, Shelden Williams, Hasheem Thabeet, and many, many more. Consensus doesn’t indicate future success. But then again, consensus was right on Draymond Green, Danny Granger, Kawhi Leonard, and many players who slid past where the public had them headed.

If it sounds like I wasted a bunch of time only to figure out that nobody knows anything, it’s because I probably did. However, peering through the hits and misses throughout the last decade of drafting is undoubtedly a delectable experience.

Limitations

First and foremost, there is a chunk of mock draft data missing from this sample. No amount of internet scouring could find ESPN’s 2005 and 2006 second rounds, or 90% of ESPN’s 2013 mock draft. Therefore, 114 of the total 1620 mock selections are missing from the three mocks over nine drafts. Only 93.58% of the mock selections across the three outlets were included.

No stat is perfect, and VORP is not without its flaws. VORP inherently factors in the percentage of a team’s minutes that a player plays, so players who are role players for some or all of their first five years may be overshadowed by players who play more minutes and perform right away.

Certain players who were drafted in between 2005 and 2013 still haven’t finished five full NBA seasons. Davis Bertans, for example, was drafted 42nd overall in 2011, but just finished his second season with San Antonio after coming overseas in 2016.

There are plenty of players included in this sample who never played a minute in the NBA. Adam Haluska, for example, has a career VORP of zero, which will be higher than a player who may have actually played in the league but just wasn’t providing positive value in their first five years (e.g. Nick Young, -4.4). Obviously a team would prefer their draft picks actually made it to the NBA, but a team would also want them to have a positive impact if they do play in the league.

Future research

The data set will only expand every year, and next year we will get the fifth season of VORP from the 2014 class. Expect fun placements from Nikola Jokic, Jordan Crawford Clarkson, Clint Capela, and more.

And since the DraftExpress/ESPN merger occurred in 2017, the council of one has selected The Ringer’s NBA Mock Draft as the official third mock of this project.

Acknowledgments

A special thanks go out to Chris Vernon and Kevin O’Connor, who gave me the idea for this project without even knowing it.

To Caleb Clearman, who texted me back and said, “whoa that’s awesome,” when I sent him this idea and for helping me get it off the ground.

To the fine folks at NBADraft.net, DraftExpress, ESPN, Basketball Reference, and the Wayback Machine, because without their sites I don’t have a project.

To Kevin Pelton, whose contributions are well documented throughout this post.

To my resident statistical dynamo Colin Clapham, who received many frantic texts about analysis throughout the process and was a sounding board for ideas.