“We get caught up in the N.C.A.A. tournament and a player goes on a deep run, and you look at that body of work, and that stands out,” he said. “Maybe an owner starts to chime in.”

Several years ago, two academic economists decided to expose N.B.A. front offices’ “irrational exuberance” in giving too much weight to a prospect’s performance in the N.C.A.A. tournament when making draft decisions.

But after they crunched the numbers, they found that this exuberance, while real, actually turned out to be rational. According to their research paper, published last year in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, players who unexpectedly rose on the draft board after above-expectations performances in the N.C.A.A. tournament tended to be better N.B.A. players.

“If you compare two players who both are No. 10 draft picks and compare the performance of the player who had a bump — who moved up because of March Madness — to one who didn’t, the one who moved up tends to do better in the N.B.A., mostly in offensive statistics,” said Anne Preston, a professor of economics at Haverford College. She wrote the paper with her husband, Casey Ichniowski, who was the chairman of Columbia Business School’s Management Division and who died in 2014.

“What we found in looking at how these players played once they got to the N.B.A. is, N.B.A. personnel should be putting a lot more weight on this,” Preston said.

The paper used regression equations on players drafted between 1997 and 2010 to evaluate which factors influenced when they were selected. The research relied on an average of three pretournament mock drafts to determine whether a player moved up in the draft after the tournament. It necessarily did not account for players who did not compete in the N.C.A.A. tournament, whether because they came straight from high school, like LeBron James; from a European league, like Dirk Nowitzki; or from college teams that failed to qualify for the tournament, like the most recent No. 1 overall picks, Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz.