2019 NBA Draft Board

June 19, 2019

Introduction

While I did not have the time this year to include a quick write up on each player like I did last year I still want to stay accountable so I'm posting my list and FVs for the draft prospects I ranked. Recall last year I wrote the following:

I'm mostly posting this to keep myself accountable and to look back on in future years. These rankings are heavily based on personal preference for certain player archetypes and my own basketball philiosophies. I especially like 3-and-D players (some of my favorite players are the rare 3-and-D point guard, like George Hill or Patrick Beverley) and lob catching/rim protecting bigs. I value smart decision makers, decisive ball movers, smart defenders, and players who seek out smart shots (dunks/layups, corner 3s, and, of course, free throws). Finally, I believe that the most talented players are often not the most important towards winning games; what is most impressive is not what is most valuable. Therefore, players whose skillset revolves around shooting contested midrange jump shots, chasing blocks, scoring out of the post, or, to a lesser degree, personal shot creation are often valued too highly, while less talented offensive players who are strong individual and team defenders are frequently undervalued by fans and front offices alike.

Most of my draft thoughts are heavily influenced by the scouting and analysis of others, primarily Dean Demakis, Evan Zamir, Jesse Fischer, the writers at The Stepien, Kevin Pelton, and The Dime Drop. I do not watch a lot of NCAA basketball, nor do I think I am a talented scout by the eye-test, so my personal opinions are derived mostly via interpreting the scouting reports from better analysts/talent evaluators, placing weight on traits I find valuable, and looking at statistical performances. Finally, I placed a lot higher weight on grouping players into tiers rather than worrying about their ordinal rank within the tier. If you're like me and more comfortable with baseball's process of grouping by Future Value rather than worrying about individual rankings, the Future Value grades on each tier would be as follows: Tier 1 would be the 65s, Tier 2 would be 60s, Tier 3 would be 55s, Tier 4 would be 50s (average starters), Tier 5 would be 45s, and the honorable mentions would be 40s.

There are some terms I frequently use that aren't well defined, so I'll do my best to define them here. I often use the term ape index (a term borrowed from rock climbing) when discussing a player's length and it measured simply as wingspan minus height. A player's toolkit is a combination of their physique, athleticism, fluidity, and coordination; essentially the physical abilities that are more difficult to teach. I define skill as a combination of ball handling and shooting ability. For example, LeBron James is not an incredibly skilled player; he is an above average shooter and ball handler, but those are likely the parts of his game that are weakest. He is merely an athletic freak in a prototype body that is (mostly) immune to injury who just happens to be a basketball genius on both ends of the court. On the other hand, a player like Kyrie Irving may be the most skilled player in the league. He is a 99th percentile ball handler and a terrific shooter and those are easily his strongest parts to his game. However, skill is not equal to value, as there are many more outside attributes that go into making a valuable player, as shown by nobody mistaking Irving for being a better player than James. Possibly the most important outside attribute is basketball IQ. Offensively, I define this as a combination of a player's passing vision, decision making with the ball, timing and positioning off the ball, and creativity (e.g., seeking out and drawing contact for fouls, using fakes and misdirections to open passing lanes, setting unusal screens that better open the floor, etc.). On the defensive end, the main skills I try and identify are choosing the right shots to contest (a counter-example would be a player like Hassan Whiteside, who frequently leaves his man to chase blocks) boxing out to ensure his team gets a rebound as opposed to fighting for a rebound of their own (e.g. Robin Lopez, whose teams rebound better with him on the floor, despite him not gathering many rebounds of his own), being engaged in off-ball defense and knowing when/where to switch (really most of the players on the current Celtics, but Marcus Smart is especially proficient), and I have a personal attaction to players who know when to jab in a swipe for a steal as an off-ball defender (Andre Iguodala and Lonzo Ball are both excellent at quickly swiping at the ball while staying engaged with their mark).

One note I would like to add is something I've been thinking about recently, which is what we are evaluating prospects on. I've witnessed many interactions where the discussion of a player has gone astray, not because the sides of the debate differed on what the player was, but because of how they valued that output. For example, take a hypothetical prospect John Doe. Alice argues that Doe is a quality prospect, because his defense, screening, and positioning will help his team greatly, while Bob argues that Doe is a scrub because he only averaged 8 points per game in college. While these are gross dramatizations of rational discussion around a prospect, it illustrates that if I am going to provide rankings and future value grades on these prospects, I should at least provide a rough outline of what they're being evaluated on.

Unfortunately, there does not exist (at least in the public domain), a widely accepted all-in-one metric for NBA players like any of the WAR-suite of metrics in baseball. The closest would be the group of adjusted plus-minus measures, but the black box nature and lack of component granularity leaves me wanting more. That said, I like the underlying thought process and thus, my evaluations are based on something similar. Since I'm not consistently evaluating my rankings, and don't plan on doing so anytime soon (maybe I'll look back in 5/10 years and see how my forecasts held up), my evaluation metric will therefore be a hypothetical metric that does not (yet) exist; infinite plus-minus. This would be a plus-minus metric, taken with inifinite sampling and infinite lineup combinations, and outputs the player's overall effect on the game in terms of the number of points above/below 0 they would add to a team's performance. A player who filled the boxscore but managed to hurt his team, either via movements not caputured by traditional stats or via #INTANGIBLES would be portrayed negatively, as would a player with excellent raw +/- stats, but only because he played with incredible teammates and against terrible competition. Things sure are fun and easy when you work with hypotheticals! I'm going to now stop this overly lengthy explanation of a universe that does not exist; it's late, I'm tired, I'm a poor writer, and it's highly unlikely that very many people will actually read this. Long story short, I'm evaluating each player on what I project to be their hypothetical impact on the game. Onto the rankings.

Tier 1 (~65 FV)

  1. Zion Williamson - PF - Duke
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 18.95

Tier 2 (~60 FV)

  1. Ja Morant - PG - Murray State
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 19.86

  2. RJ Barrett - SG - Duke
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.01

Tier 3 (~55 FV)

  1. Jaxson Hayes - C - Texas
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.07
    Height: 83.5
    Wingspan: 87.5
    Reach: 110.5
    Ape: +4

  2. Jarrett Culver - SG - Texas Tech
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 20.33
    Height: 78.75
    Wingspan: 81.5
    Reach: 100.5
    Ape: +2.75

  3. Talen Horton-Tucker - SF - Iowa State
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 18.56
    Height: 76
    Wingspan: 85.25
    Reach: 103
    Ape: +9.25

  4. Darius Garland - PG - Vanderbilt
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.39

  5. PJ Washington - PF - Kentucky
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 20.82
    Height: 80
    Wingspan: 86.25
    Reach: 106.5
    Ape: +6.25

Tier 4 (~50 FV)

  1. Jontay Porter - C - Missouri
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 19.59
    Height: 83
    Wingspan: 84
    Reach: 109.5
    Ape: +1

  2. Grant Williams - PF - Tennessee
    Grade: Junior
    Age: 20.55
    Height: 79.5
    Wingspan: 81.75
    Reach: 104.5
    Ape: +2.25

  3. Cam Reddish - SF - Duke
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.8
    Height: 80
    Wingspan: 84.5
    Reach: 105.5
    Ape: +4.5

  4. Nicolas Claxton - C - Georgia
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 20.17
    Height: 83.75
    Wingspan: 86.5
    Reach: 110
    Ape: +2.75

  5. Chuma Okeke - PF - Auburn
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 20.84

  6. Goga Bitadze - C - Buducnost VOLI (Montenegrin Basketball League)
    Age: 19.92

  7. Bol Bol - C - Oregon
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.59
    Height: 86.5
    Wingspan: 91
    Reach: 115.5
    Ape: +4.5

Tier 5 (~45 FV)

  1. Coby White - SG - North Carolina
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.34
    Height: 76.75
    Wingspan: 77
    Reach: 97.5
    Ape: +0.25

  2. Brandon Clarke - PF - Gonzaga
    Grade: Junior
    Age: 22.75
    Height: 80.25
    Wingspan: 80.25
    Reach: 102
    Ape: +0

  3. Tyler Herro - SG - Kentucky
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.41
    Height: 78
    Wingspan: 75.25
    Reach: 100.5

  4. Nickeil Alexander-Walker - SG - Virginia Tech
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 20.8
    Height: 77.5
    Wingspan: 81.5
    Reach: 102
    Ape: +4

  5. Nassir Little - SF - North Carolina
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.35
    Height: 78
    Wingspan: 85.25
    Reach: 104.5
    Ape: +7.25

  6. Romeo Langford - SF - Indiana
    Grade: Freshman
    Age: 19.65
    Height: 78
    Wingspan: 83
    Reach: 103
    Ape: +5

  7. DeAndre Hunter - PF - Virginia
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 21.55

  8. Ty Jerome - SG - Virginia
    Grade: Junior
    Age: 21.95
    Height: 77.5
    Wingspan: 76
    Reach: 98

  9. Sekou Doumbouya - PF - Guinea
    Age: 18.49

  10. KZ Okpala - SF - Stanford
    Grade: Sophomore
    Age: 20.14
    Height: 81.5
    Wingspan: 85.75
    Reach: 106.5
    Ape: +4.25

  11. Rui Hachimura - PF - Gonzaga
    Grade: Junior
    Age: 21.36

  12. Carsen Edwards - PG - Purdue
    Grade: Junior
    Age: 21.27
    Height: 72.25
    Wingspan: 78
    Reach: 94.5
    Ape: +5.75

Honorable Mentions (~40 FV) (ordered alphabetically)