2021 NBA Draft Safari

[adam81king]

Dean Wade might be the single greatest athlete of our times, he's just unnecessarily selfless and it leads to him being looked over.

If Dean Wade and Gary Barnidge had a baby, it'd be Chuck Norris...


...but play ball like Paul Pierce.

 

[Nathan S]

Here's my board at the moment. I'll probably go through it again tomorrow, but don't expect to make any significant changes.

EDIT: Made a few minor changes.

Tier 1

Alperen Sengun

Tier 2

Evan Mobley
Scottie Barnes
Franz Wagner
Jalen Suggs
Jalen Green
Josh Giddey

Tier 3

Usman Garuba
Jonathan Kuminga
Miles McBride
Jaden Springer
Moses Moody
Cade Cunningham

Tier 4

Sharife Cooper
JT Thor
Isaiah Jackson
Jared Butler
Justin Champagnie
Quentin Grimes
Jalen Johnson
Luka Garza
Day'Ron Sharpe
Rokas Jokubaitis
Davion Mitchell
Jeremiah Robinson-Earl
Herbert Jones
Cameron Thomas
Filip Petrusev
Daishen Nix
Brandon Boston
James Bouknight
Kai Jones
Moses Wright
Tre Mann
Keon Johnson

Tier 5

McKinley Wright
Josh Christopher
Jay Huff
Jose Alvarado
DeJon Jarreau
Neemias Queta
Vrenz Bleijenbergh
David Duke
Matthew Hurt
Trey Murphy III
Max Abmas
Trendon Watford
Joel Ayayi
Aaron Henry
Mark Vital
Ayo Dosunmu
Chris Duarte
Aamir Sims
Juhann Begarin
Corey Kispert
Jason Preston
Eugene Omoruyi
Amar Sylla
Josh Primo
Charles Bassey

First 10 out

DJ Steward
Nah'Shon Hyland
JaQuori McLaughlin
Dalano Banton
Matt Mitchell
Ziaire Williams
Austin Reaves
RaiQuan Gray
Joe Wieskamp
Scottie Lewis

Next 10 out

Carlik Jones
Sandro Mamukelashvili
Isaiah Todd
Marcus Zegarowski
Santi Aldama
Marcus Garrett
Dru Smith
Cameron Krutwig
Isaiah Livers
Jericho Sims

 

[stoike]

Here's my board at the moment. I'll probably go through it again tomorrow, but don't expect to make any significant changes.

Tier 1

Alperen Sengun

Tier 2

Evan Mobley
Scottie Barnes
Franz Wagner
Jalen Suggs
Jalen Green
Josh Giddey

Tier 3

Usman Garuba
Jonathan Kuminga
Miles McBride
Jaden Springer
Moses Moody
Cade Cunningham
Sharife Cooper
JT Thor
Isaiah Jackson

Tier 4

Jared Butler
Davion Mitchell
Quentin Grimes
Jalen Johnson
Luka Garza
Day'Ron Sharpe
Rokas Jokubaitis
Justin Champagnie
Jeremiah Robinson-Earl
Herbert Jones
Cameron Thomas
Filip Petrusev
Daishen Nix
Brandon Boston
James Bouknight
Kai Jones
Moses Wright

Tier 5

Tre Mann
McKinley Wright
Josh Christopher
Jay Huff
Jose Alvarado
Neemias Queta
Vrenz Bleijenbergh
David Duke
Matthew Hurt
Trey Murphy III
Max Abmas
Corey Kispert
Trendon Watford
Keon Johnson
Aaron Henry
Joel Ayayi
Mark Vital
Ayo Dosunmu
DeJon Jarreau
Aamir Sims
Chris Duarte
Jason Preston
Eugene Omoruyi
Amar Sylla
Josh Primo
Joe Wieskamp
RaiQuan Gray

First 10 out

Juhann Begarin
DJ Steward
Dalano Banton
Jericho Sims
Nah'Shon Hyland
Charles Bassey
Ziaire Williams
JaQuori McLaughlin
Isaiah Livers
Matt Mitchell

Next 10 out

Austin Reaves
Scottie Lewis
Carlik Jones
Sandro Mamukelashvili
Isaiah Todd
Marcus Zegarowski
Santi Aldama
Marcus Garrett
Dru Smith
Cameron Krutwig

At first I was afraid you were serious. Then I saw Cunningham in the 3rd tier and thought "No one can be this clueless!" Thanks for the laugh. The first tier is hilarious too!

 

[bs80]

Here's my board at the moment. I'll probably go through it again tomorrow, but don't expect to make any significant changes

Dude, you're such a nerd and I fucking love it!!

So with people like you that create and fine-tune a model like this, I'm curious as to how much stock you put into the model itself. I'm assuming that if you're diligent enough to take on such a project, you're also smart enough to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your model.

My question would be, if you were running the war room, and you had the #1 pick tomorrow but were not allowed to trade it, who would you pick? Do you stick with your model and go with Sengun? Do you see your model as one important piece of information but not the sole evaluation tool and go with Mobley or Green?

Also, I see that you have Cade in a much lower tier, and I'm not knocking your model at all for that. But would you be willing to take a straight up even money bet that Sengun ends up being a better NBA player than Cunningham?

Again, not knocking your model at all, I'm actually really impressed. I'm just fascinated by how such models are built and more importantly how the author of such models would use them.

 

[kriegs]

Here's my board at the moment. I'll probably go through it again tomorrow, but don't expect to make any significant changes.

Tier 1

Alperen Sengun

Tier 2

Evan Mobley
Scottie Barnes
Franz Wagner
Jalen Suggs
Jalen Green
Josh Giddey

Tier 3

Usman Garuba
Jonathan Kuminga
Miles McBride
Jaden Springer
Moses Moody
Cade Cunningham
Sharife Cooper
JT Thor
Isaiah Jackson

Tier 4

Jared Butler
Davion Mitchell
Quentin Grimes
Jalen Johnson
Luka Garza
Day'Ron Sharpe
Rokas Jokubaitis
Justin Champagnie
Jeremiah Robinson-Earl
Herbert Jones
Cameron Thomas
Filip Petrusev
Daishen Nix
Brandon Boston
James Bouknight
Kai Jones
Moses Wright

Tier 5

Tre Mann
McKinley Wright
Josh Christopher
Jay Huff
Jose Alvarado
Neemias Queta
Vrenz Bleijenbergh
David Duke
Matthew Hurt
Trey Murphy III
Max Abmas
Corey Kispert
Trendon Watford
Keon Johnson
Aaron Henry
Joel Ayayi
Mark Vital
Ayo Dosunmu
DeJon Jarreau
Aamir Sims
Chris Duarte
Jason Preston
Eugene Omoruyi
Amar Sylla
Josh Primo
Joe Wieskamp
RaiQuan Gray

First 10 out

Juhann Begarin
DJ Steward
Dalano Banton
Jericho Sims
Nah'Shon Hyland
Charles Bassey
Ziaire Williams
JaQuori McLaughlin
Isaiah Livers
Matt Mitchell

Next 10 out

Austin Reaves
Scottie Lewis
Carlik Jones
Sandro Mamukelashvili
Isaiah Todd
Marcus Zegarowski
Santi Aldama
Marcus Garrett
Dru Smith
Cameron Krutwig

Ok so I’m feeling greedy right now. Let’s get the 2 best players in the draft tomorrow. GET ER DONE FERRY!

 

[kriegs]

At first I was afraid you were serious. Then I saw Cunningham in the 3rd tier and thought "No one can be this clueless!" Thanks for the laugh. The first tier is hilarious too!

Where’s your model?

 

[Nathan S]

Where’s your model?

Here are the notes I wrote up a couple years back, happy to answer any questions:

First, a few sentences about how I see the role of statistics in scouting. They're an imperfect source of information among many other imperfect sources of information...they're useful enough to merit consideration, and if you're going to consider them, you might as well do so systematically (i.e. "advanced" statistics, actually finding useful correlations between NCAA stats and NBA performance), not haphazardly (e.g. cherrypicking individual statistics to bolster some preconceived notion about a player). To emphasize how imperfect they are, De'Andre Hunter's per-40 defensive stats stand at 6.3 boards, 0.7 steals, 0.7 blocks. No amount of staring at a box score is going to make you realize that he's a valuable defensive player. There's some hope that more advanced player tracking stats can do a better job, which is probably true, but that's a discussion for another day.

Methodology details below:

---

My model attempts to predict NBA adjusted plus/minus. The major benefit of predicting APM, instead of an NBA box score metric, is that my model doesn't inherit any biases at this stage (e.g. a model that tries to predict PER will necessarily end up with all the same biases/flaws of PER). The major drawback is that adjusted plus/minus is a very noisy stat, and the price I pay for trying to predict a noisy stat is relatively high uncertainties in my model coefficients (e.g. the marginal value of an NCAA assist, or rebound). Ultimately, it's a good tradeoff because in most cases the extra uncertainty in my predictions due to uncertainty in model coefficients is small relative to other sources of uncertainty.

My model assumes that there are no interaction terms between parameters. That means that the value of an NCAA player's assist according to my model does not depend at all on how many rebounds he gets, or how many points he scores.

It turns out that this assumption is absolutely crucial. Without it, a model is extremely vulnerable to a problem called "overfitting" in which it's basically tricked into thinking some artifact of statistical noise that affected a few prospects in the past is a fundamental rule that applies to all prospects in the future. A model suffering from overfitting generally does a good job explaining outcomes for past prospects but produces wonky and inaccurate predictions for future prospects.

The last important thing my model does is estimate uncertainties in its predictions, something notably lacking from most such models people have published. This illuminates some of the strengths and weaknesses of my model. For example, the largest contributor to uncertainty is made two-pointers, that is, my model is generally less accurate in predicting players who make a lot of two pointers. This makes some sense; a player's two pointers made per game (even taken together with two point percentage, or equivalently two pointers missed) falls far short of describing how good a scorer the player really is inside the arc. There's just not enough information in this part of the box score to properly evaluate a player.

Some more minor things:

-All stats are per possession. I also include height, and minutes per game.

-I assume a quadratic aging curve. I found that on offense, better prospects actually follow a steeper aging curve than worse prospects, and I accounted for this as well.

-My sample only goes through the 2012 draft. This hurts my sample size, and also hurts because my model is really tuned to predict how players entering the NBA a decade ago would be expected to perform. Obviously the NBA has changed since then and I have no way of adjusting for that.

-My sample only includes prospects that went on to play significant NBA minutes, so it suffers from "survivor bias" and therefore tends to be slightly too optimistic in its projections. How to correct for this is an interesting question in its own right that I won't get into for now (but could talk more about if you're interested).

-My model has some interesting artifacts because of the relatively large uncertainties in the coefficients I mentioned earlier. For instance, made two pointers have a slight (not statistically significant) negative value. In reality, they probably have (at least) a slight positive value. I could manually correct things like this to make my model slightly better, but that's obviously a slippery slope toward tweaking and tuning my model in retrospect to make it look like I think it "should." So I decided to just let it be, even in cases where the helpful tweak is obvious.

-My model doesn't account for strength of schedule or team strength.

 

[Nathan S]

Dude, you're such a nerd and I fucking love it!!

So with people like you that create and fine-tune a model like this, I'm curious as to how much stock you put into the model itself. I'm assuming that if you're diligent enough to take on such a project, you're also smart enough to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your model.

My question would be, if you were running the war room, and you had the #1 pick tomorrow but were not allowed to trade it, who would you pick? Do you stick with your model and go with Sengun? Do you see your model as one important piece of information but not the sole evaluation tool and go with Mobley or Green?

Also, I see that you have Cade in a much lower tier, and I'm not knocking your model at all for that. But would you be willing to take a straight up even money bet that Sengun ends up being a better NBA player than Cunningham?

Again, not knocking your model at all, I'm actually really impressed. I'm just fascinated by how such models are built and more importantly how the author of such models would use them.

As I've mentioned before, this is one of the big reasons why I went through the trouble of calculating uncertainties in my projections. Without them, it's impossible to know how seriously to take them.

Given the information I have, I'm fairly confident that even in the face of mainstream skepticism, Sengun is the most probable superstar in this draft. That said, the scenario where I'm forced to stay at #1 is kinda unrealistic. I can greatly bolster my odds of having a successful draft by trading down for Sengun+Barnes, and that's exactly what I'd attempt to do.

As my signature suggests, I don't really believe in "playing it safe" on a fundamental level. You're not going to build a championship team by simply playing it safe at every turn. The whole game is to take calculated risks.

And finally, yeah, I'd be happy to bet straight-up that Sengun will be a better NBA player than Cade.

 

[Jstock12]

That said, the scenario where I'm forced to stay at #1 is kinda unrealistic. I can greatly bolster my odds of having a successful draft by trading down for Sengun+Barnes, and that's exactly what I'd attempt to do.

I love it, playing chess while everyone else playing checkers.

P.S. I guess if you were the Pistons GM, you would have taken that SGA+6 for Cade deal and ran away?

 

[ewizacft]

Hey guys, I also have a model I would like you to take a look at. Take as much time as you need.

 

[Sir'Dom Pointer]

Jalen Johnson and Mobley/Green for the Cavs.

 

[J_J]

It would be dream come true if we get Mobley at 3. It would be great if we can get another pick somehow with this draft.

 

[sailfish]

It would be dream come true if we get Mobley at 3. It would be great if we can get another pick somehow with this draft.

Mobley will be a Cav in T-minus 14 hours.

I think Koby & company will possibly trade for a 2nd round pick, using one or more of the three 2nd rounders that they have a next year. A few names to watch- BJ Boston & Jason Preston.

 

[I'mWithDan]

Here's my board at the moment. I'll probably go through it again tomorrow, but don't expect to make any significant changes.

Tier 1

Alperen Sengun

Tier 2

Evan Mobley
Scottie Barnes
Franz Wagner
Jalen Suggs
Jalen Green
Josh Giddey

Tier 3

Usman Garuba
Jonathan Kuminga
Miles McBride
Jaden Springer
Moses Moody
Cade Cunningham
Sharife Cooper
JT Thor
Isaiah Jackson

Tier 4

Jared Butler
Davion Mitchell
Quentin Grimes
Jalen Johnson
Luka Garza
Day'Ron Sharpe
Rokas Jokubaitis
Justin Champagnie
Jeremiah Robinson-Earl
Herbert Jones
Cameron Thomas
Filip Petrusev
Daishen Nix
Brandon Boston
James Bouknight
Kai Jones
Moses Wright

Tier 5

Tre Mann
McKinley Wright
Josh Christopher
Jay Huff
Jose Alvarado
Neemias Queta
Vrenz Bleijenbergh
David Duke
Matthew Hurt
Trey Murphy III
Max Abmas
Corey Kispert
Trendon Watford
Keon Johnson
Aaron Henry
Joel Ayayi
Mark Vital
Ayo Dosunmu
DeJon Jarreau
Aamir Sims
Chris Duarte
Jason Preston
Eugene Omoruyi
Amar Sylla
Josh Primo
Joe Wieskamp
RaiQuan Gray

First 10 out

Juhann Begarin
DJ Steward
Dalano Banton
Jericho Sims
Nah'Shon Hyland
Charles Bassey
Ziaire Williams
JaQuori McLaughlin
Isaiah Livers
Matt Mitchell

Next 10 out

Austin Reaves
Scottie Lewis
Carlik Jones
Sandro Mamukelashvili
Isaiah Todd
Marcus Zegarowski
Santi Aldama
Marcus Garrett
Dru Smith
Cameron Krutwig

I always like to pay attention to guys our models both really like. I think Haliburton was the poster child last year.

Relative to your tiers and ranks, those players this year would be:

Sengun, Mobley, Green, Barnes and Wagner.

My stuff tends to like Cade a lot more than yours does but I do buy that he is a more divisive prospect that the mainstream draft community has done too much group think on.

In the middle of the draft, we both see these guys as potential values:

Butler, Mitchell, Champagnie, Jackson

 

[J_J]

Mobley will be a Cav in T-minus 14 hours.

I think Koby & company will possibly trade for a 2nd round pick, using one or more of the three 2nd rounders that they have a next year. A few names to watch- BJ Boston & Jason Preston.

Personally I would select him at one. The game has changed where many teams value wings more. If this was a couple years ago, I believe he would be number one.