Does the Media draft better than the NBA?

Testing out a Draft Strategy Hypothesis

The 2021 NBA Draft had me in shambles.

I remember it vividly: My San Antonio Spurs were picking 12th overall – the second highest pick they’d ever achieved in my lifetime. We used the #11 pick on Devin Vassell the year prior in, DeMar DeRozan was finally on the way out, and it seemed like a true rebuild was underway. It was going to be painful, but worth it.

You can probably imagine how excited I was when the Spurs came around on the clock. Here we were about to select a key piece to build around for the future; Hell, he might even become a franchise guy! I was ecstatic, and dedicated myself to learning about every possibility for the 12th pick in the days leading up.

You can probably imagine my surprise, then, when the Spurs selected a guy I'd never heard of named Joshua Primo with the #12 pick. Who is Josh Primo, you ask? Great question.

Josh Primo was a three-point specialist who came off of the bench for a solid Alabama squad during his lone season in Tuscaloosa. He averaged a hair over eight points for the Crimson Tide in about 22 minutes a game. He was, basically, a solid rotation piece for a NCAA tournament team.

I hadn’t heard of him when we picked him because, well, I had only done research on the guys projected to go around #12, and Joshua Primo ranked 30th on the Media Consensus Board. We picked him 18 slots ahead of where the media thought he would (or should) go.

Now, it’s not the player that gets me frustrated. I honestly like Josh Primo, and of everyone that was picked after him, there’s only a few guys I’d rather have. My frustration on that night was not that the Spurs drafted Josh Primo the player so much as it is about how the team ran draft night. If they loved the kid so much in the draft, why wouldn’t they just move back to take him? Even if Spurs GM Brian Wright had moved back to, say, the 20th pick and picked up some extra draft capital, we still could have reached ten spots from his expected position to take him. That still would have probably pissed me off, but it would be nothing compared to how livid I was on draft night.

Instead of snagging Alperen Sengun or Moses Moody, the guys highest on my own board as well as the wider draft community, we reached for a guy that half the media thought was a second rounder. Why didn’t we just take the dude everyone thought we would?

I know other people feel this way with their team, too. You do so much draft research, and then when time comes around to pick, they pick a dude 10 spots higher than you thought they’d go. Or worse yet there is a clear top talent slipping, and your team sticks to their guns as if the guy was never an option to begin with (hello, Tyrese Haliburton).

Which leads me to why I am writing this article. I had an epiphany on that night and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since: What if NBA teams just picked based off of the media consensus instead of their own scouting?

It’s something I’d heard someone say before about the NFL draft, but I never really gave it the time of day. It would be an odd, maybe even unprecedented way to run a draft, but when you sit back and think about it for a second, the reasoning is sound. The media consensus is the most democratic way of thinking about the draft – an aggregate number of experts ranking their own favorites, just like an NBA team would do, but with a larger sample size.

It’s a very armchair expert thing to say, which is why I decided to look back at the data to prove my point.

2016 Big Board Comparison

I figured the first step to look at is a side-by-side evaluation of how the NBA draft actually played out vs the media consensus board. The exercise is simple, and you can do it too: I am looking at which draft, knowing what we know now, makes more sense. I randomly picked the 2016 draft here to do a side-by-side comparison. Take a look for yourself: Consensus vs Actual. Browse through it for a second and make notes on some of the hits and misses. Once you’re done, we’ll look at some the data critically.

Okay, so there’s a few notes here.

Jaylen Brown was a riskier pick than I thought he was. If you look at the averages on the consensus board, it seems like no one really knew what was going on with that third pick. Props to the Celtics for beating the Media and reaching for a future all-star.

Further back in the draft, the same thing happened with some more players like Caris LeVert and Pascal Siakam, who went #20 and #27 respectfully. They were supposed to be mid-second rounders, and they were taken in the mid-to-late first. Bold picks, and they worked out.

For the most part, it seems like the media had better picks, even if not by much. Jamal Murray went a spot after he was supposed to, and while I love Buddy Hield, those guys aren’t on the same stratosphere. The same was true of Jakob Poeltl and Domantas Sabonis – both guys slipped just a little bit because the actual NBA teams opted for Marquis Chriss and Thon Maker instead (The latter of which was was 31st on the consensus board).

Some of the value seems to come in the role players here. Guys like Furkan Korkmaz and Ivica Zubac ranked about a dozen spots higher on the consensus board, but slipped on draft night substantially.

Dejounte Murray slipped from #18 on the consensus to the Spurs at #29. Some call the Spurs good in the draft, and they undoubtedly are, but when looking back at the consensus board it doesn’t seem like that was too tough of a pick for me.

At the end of the day, the media was a mixed bag. There were guys that they missed on and guys that they hit on – just like the NBA teams that were picking did. It’s not nearly as clear cut to me as I thought it might be. But that’s just one draft. Right?

2017 Big Board Comparison

Same thing, but we’re skipping ahead to 2017. Here’s the Consensus, here’s the Actual Draft. Peruse away, notes below.

The Celtics once again took a leap of faith drafting Jayson Tatum at #3, passing up the consensus #3 pick Josh Jackson in favor of a true franchise player.

It seems like there’s more of the same in terms of each list’s hits and misses, just on different players. The media missed on Bam Adebayo, but the league missed on OG Anunoby. John Collins and Jarrett Allen slipped from the consensus board, whereas the NBA beat the media on guys like Josh Hart and Kyle Kuzma at the end of the first round. It was, once again, a mixed bag.

2018 Big Board Comparison

You know the drill. Consensus. Actual. Go.

So this one seems a little more lopsided in the media’s favor. It was a deep draft, admittedly, and so there were good picks all over the board. But the media’s big board seemed much better overall than how the actual draft played out.

Outside of Trae Young being flipped with Mo Bamba, the only real wins I could find for the NBA board were Grayson Allen jumping up ten slots, maybe Landry Shamet’s similar leap, and Devonte Graham’s second round climb. Other than that, the media was right in almost every circumstance. Here are some of the players which were drafted after the media consensus:

Luka Doncic, Mikal Bridges, Shai Gilgeous Alexander, Rob Williams, De’Anthony Melton, Michael Porter Jr., Miles Bridges, Kevin Huerter… I could go on. The media owned this draft.

Conclusions

In all, I think I was right, albeit maybe not to the extent I thought I would be. It seemed like there were a few drafts where the media consensus and the actual draft were pretty much the same in terms of value-per-pick.

But after running the exercise through some other drafts too, there are certainly instances like the 2018 draft where the media consensus seemed to beat the NBA draft pretty handily. the theory is not as pronounced as I thought it might be, but I do think that there is something true to the idea that the media consensus may actually be better than the actual NBA board. I’m going to keep playing around with this idea, but for now, that’s where I land.