So its draft time again and gm’s are suddenly in a trading frenzy in an attempt to secure precious draft picks.  A chance to roll the dice for the future, a chance to find your franchise cornerstone.  Gm’s have been scouting like crazy, watching grainy youtube highlight packages and summer league games.  Everyone likes to think they have an eye for talent, the ability to find that diamond in the rough.  But how likely is it really that you will in fact strike gold?  Are the odds stacked against you?  What are the odds of finding a starter in the lottery?  Is there a hidden draft sweet spot?  To try and answer these questions and more we thought we would take a look at draft history and tabulate players’ draft picks (1st round only) vs their current CBS ranks.  We have had 12 drafts commencing with the class of 2003, (Lebron, Wade, Melo etc).

The colour coding helps to see the trends with green being a high ranked player, (good) through shades of yellow and then red, (bad).

As can be seen generally the table is greener towards the lottery picks however there are a few sweet spots where it always seems a few good players slip through the cracks.  To make it easier to summarise the following graph shows the average of each picks over the 12 years.

There seems to be a few groups;

• Picks 1 & 2 are most likely to yield you a very good player (likely allstar)

• Picks 3 – 6 are also quite likely to result in a starting level player

• Picks 8 – 22 will generally yield at least a backup

• Picks 22 – 27 seems to be the spot where there is a chance a really good player may slip through the cracks and be drafted here

• Picks 28-30 generally end up as reserves

To try and put labels on these numbers, CBS ranks were counted for each pick over the past 12years and then categorised into one of five categories, (Allstar, Starter, Backup, Reserve, Out of League).  The following graph shows the results.

As can be seen the %likelihood a player selected at each pick will end up in each category is shown.  For example for pick 1’s they are 50% likely to become allstars, 17% likely to be starters, 8% likely to be a backup, 0% likely to be a reserve however they have a 25% chance of being out of the league, (or a bust) with the next twelve years.

To further simplify things the draft picks were grouped into 4 basic categories: (Top 5, Lottery, Top 20, 1st Round) and then graphed to show the % likelihood a player drafted in these groups will end up.  This is shown below:

So as we can see a top 5 pick, (blue column) is 18% likely to become an Allstar, 43% likely to become a Starter, 18% likely to become a Backup, 10% likely to become a reserve and is 10% likely to be out of the league within 12 years.  The chances of finding an Allstar is 17% in the top 5, 10% in the lottery and about 5% in the 1st round whilst you have about a 43% chance to find a starter in the top 5, 30% chance to find a starter in the lottery and about 22% in the 1st round. So it seems that the most noticeable step up in odds of finding very good players really occurs in the Top 5.  After that odds level out quite a bit.