As a follow up to the models I have been creating for the draft I made a data visualization of the prospects posted at Hardwood Paroxysm before draft night. Now that the teams have made their selection I have a new one focusing on the Celtics new rookies.

The visualization uses Tableau's "Story" format, which is basically an interactive data focused Power Point. You can either click through the slides with my filters applied to see some of the data that jumps out for me from their seasons last year, or change the filters around to see their stats compared to different groups of players.

The first group of data slides use standardized data for different classes of data like steals and scoring so that the scale will be the same. For example, you'll see that Marcus Smart's steals and blocks rating was 2.3 standard deviations over the average prospect, that's elite. A zero is exactly average, while +1 is good in that category and -1 is not good overall. However, some categories are fairly position dependent, like assists or rebounds, so I have the vizualizations grouped by position. Age is another occassionally underappreciated factor, so the main vizuations compare to players in the rough cohort of the Celticis draftees.

But, feel free to mix and match.

Overall, I am more excited by Marcus Smart than James Young, when I look at these numbers. It is unfortunate that his one obvious flaw jump shooting, overlaps with the team's current best player Rajon Rondo's weakest point. But his all around games is really strong, if he can improve the jumper he'll have a chance to be elite.

I rated Young as an end of the first round prospect. But Young is really young, and he showed definite improvement as the year went on. On offense, his catch and shoot jumper is solid (almost 90% of his threes were assisted acoording to Hoop-Math, but not fantastic at this point, but he pulls up for too many mid-range twos when driving (17.6 percent of non-transition two point jumpers were unassisted). On the other hand his turnovers were low for his age and assists were decent for a wing player, especially a freshman. But, the steals and blocks tell the same story as the scouting reports, his defense will need to improve to actually stay on the court.