How to Maximize Your Draft Pick: a Case Study

A Case Study in Using Consensus Boards and league intel to Inform the Draft

A bit back I wrote a piece on whether NBA media drafts more effectively than the NBA itself. As a whole, I concluded that they do. My theory came down to methodology which, in a weird way, proves why democracies are better than monarchies.

An NBA Front office really does operate like a monarchy in regards to the draft: the General Manager is the King, and he has various people to help him decide on certain issues. At the end of the day, he sources information from the people around him to make his own informed decision, and that decision is final. In the draft, this looks like hiring scouts to relay their own opinions about prospects to the GM, who then takes a look at the film himself and decides if he agrees with their evaluations. He picks his favorite player from there.

The media operates a little differently though. Writers may have assistants, but at the end of the day they are making the picks entirely on their own. They are almost like an unchecked monarchy in this sense – with no skin in the game they can make outlandish claims and go relatively unscathed.

But the point is not that you should trust one media member. My hypothesis was that you should trust the media consensus over your own evaluations – the list of who the media likes most on average. This way, radical ideas can be tempered by more conservative ones, and the result is a properly weighed listing of multiple evaluation. It’s a pure democracy, where everyone’s opinion is weighed similarly.

Now this does not always mean that the media is right. There are plenty of examples of the media having a guy too low or too high; of course writers miss often on prospects. The point is more about achieving better analytic trends than finding some a foolproof method. It’s impossible to never miss, but by utilizing media trends we can miss less often (and hit big more often, too) by evaluating the surplus value to be gained from out assets.

Let’s look at my beloved Spurs as an example in how not to enact this principle. Usually the organization is amazing in the draft, so consider this nitpicky, but I think it may be the best example to display how teams can maximize their assets.

Say you are a GM of a team and you really like a guy who is ranked #30 on the consensus board. Great, you have a sleeper! But let’s also say you have the 12th pick in the draft. This is the exact issue the Spurs experienced on draft night in 2021 with University of Alabama freshman Joshua Primo.

Primo’s draft profile was intriguing, to be sure: one of the youngest guys in the class, a knockdown shooter, and a large frame that many thought could get even bigger. He had a few knocks, but most of them were wrapped up in the fact that we hadn’t really seen much of him as a player. Primo came off the bench for an Alabama team that had been a 6th seed in the NCAA tournament, and he was only the 5th leading scorer on the team. In order to be a lottery pick, players usually have to show a bit more than that. But that didn’t matter to the league’s premiere organization – The Spurs fell in love with what they’d seen from the kid.

Okay, well the problem remains: the Spurs have the 12th pick in the draft, and the guy we really want is being mocked by half of the aggregated media to be picked in the second round. It’s not an issue per se, but it certainly should require a bit of creativity in order to get your guy than simply taking him #12 overall.

There are a few ways for a team to get their guy and not reach massively on the player.

One option is to trade up from the top of the second round into the end of the first. Odds are, if you like him a lot, at least a few other teams will too. That 30th spot is maybe a little too low of an evaluation in your mind, so in order for you to get him, you may have to trade up four or five picks before #30 in order to get him. There’s precedent for this sort of trade – in 2022 a team traded an expiring vet contract and a high second-rounder for what became the #20 pick in the draft. Oh wait, that was the Spurs!

In all likelihood it wouldn’t be this easy, but by working the phones the Spurs could probably flip their 41st pick and a solid veteran for a pick in the 20s to snag Primo. This way the organization could select someone at #12 who was valued highly by the league, and sneak in their Primo pick in the 20s.

However, maybe the team doesn’t want to lose assets in order to gain Primo – they might like the vets on their team, and don’t want to include them in a deal for their organizational stability as a whole. That’s a really valid way of thinking, and might be why the Spurs decided not to pursue this option.

The second option, the one I think makes the most sense, would be to take your #12 draft pick and extrapolate its value backwards. If you want to take Primo, you can still pick up an asset by trading back in order to get him. Hell, you can even still reach massively on him to ensure he’s yours while still picking up another draft pick.

If you’re going to trade back for your guy, you want to get as big a package back as you can in return. Here’s where you start gathering intel on what the rest of the league is thinking in order to maximize the value of that pick.

In the 2021 draft, there seemed an obvious trade partner for the Spurs to pursue: The New York Knicks. The Knicks fell in love with Chris Duarte in the pre-draft process, who sat at #18 on the consensus board:

But then another detail unfolded:

So to recap: the Spurs love Primo, ranked #30 on the consensus board, and the Knicks love Duarte, #18th, but there was smoke that he might go earlier (smoke that ended up being correct) which would require the Knicks to get into the early teens. Perfect fit, right? The Spurs could trade back to snag both of New York’s first round picks – which it was confirmed they were offering to teams a few picks after the Spurs:

With those picks, the Spurs could draft Primo with the first Knicks pick (which would have been a massive risk anyway, considering #19 is still 11 slots higher than consensus) and the Knicks could slither in front of who eventually ended up picking Duarte, the Indiana Pacers at #13.

There was only one problem in the equation: Murmurs about Primo potentially going to the Thunder at #16 or #18. The murmurs weren’t loud by any means (making me question whether they were genuine in the first place), but every piece of intel is absolutely worth considering in this position. It would not have stopped me from making a deal, but I can understand why potentially the Spurs may have not taken those Knicks deals with that little tidbit. *

*Side note: I think that the real reason the Spurs did not do any dealing with the Knicks was the 2019 Marcus Morris debacle where the Knicks essentially beat the Spurs’ bid after they already agreed to terms with the player. It seems like there was a massive breach of trust in the Spurs’ minds with the whole event. Here’s Pop talking about it to the media:

Okay, so we’re back to square one, right? Whether it was a grudge or the shaky OKC intel, it was enough to scare the Spurs out of the Knicks offer. Did they have any other alternatives to maximize this pick’s value while still getting their guy?

Yes, actually. If you remember, there was another team that was looking to trade up for Duarte – the Golden State Warriors, who sat at pick #14. Now, moving up from #14 to #12 is going to get you far less assets than the Knicks offer of #19 and #21, but if the Warriors really wanted the guy enough to pursue him after the draft too, you’d think they’d be okay giving up a substantial asset to leapfrog the team that eventually picked him.

There’s no indication that the Spurs made such a call, though. Maybe the Warriors were hoping he’d drop just one more spot past the Spurs, but that doesn’t really make sense based on how we thought the draft would shake out at the time. All signs point toward the Warriors being open for business, and with their great organizational relationship, it doesn’t really make sense why the Spurs wouldn’t maximize that value in a win-win deal.

But even though everything made sense about moving back, the Spurs decided to keep the pick anyway. Either internally or to their face, the Knicks and Warriors deals never happened, and the Spurs drafted the #30 consensus player with the #12 pick. I’ll let you click on Woj’s tweet to see the replies yourself.

Now, my problem wasn’t with Josh Primo the player – it was how I saw the Spurs mismanaging the #12 pick as an asset that I was frustrated with. I understand front offices falling in love with players, but I don’t understand how they don’t leverage their draft spot more to acquire the player later on.

So then the Spurs’ 2021 draft is a cautionary tale of “falling in love” with a guy. If you allow your internal evaluation to become gospel truth, you risk completely overvaluing the player. The question we should be asking is not “what pick is this player worth”, but rather “what is this player’s value to us, and what is it to the rest of the league”. That chasm – between internal evaluation and external evaluation – is what teams need to exploit in order to maximize their assets.

As I said, I am being overly nitpicky with the Spurs here. I love them dearly, and they almost always make the right decision in these circumstances. I even like what I’ve seen from Primo thus far – perhaps he really was the 12th best player in the draft! But once again it’s about process.

Hopefully this tells us a bit about how teams can manage assets moving forward. I think there’s key lessons about how to utilize media consensus boards too as a legitimate source of intel for league perceptions of prospects. Utilizing consensus boards do not necessarily mean you need to pick the top guy every time, like I did in my previous piece, but figuring out the value of the pick you have. Maybe, like I think the Spurs should have done here, you utilize the information to get the guy you really like, but move back in the draft to pick up an asset along the way as well.

Player evaluation is always retrospective, but process can be evaluated in real time. Instead of falling in love with a player’s potential, maybe teams should start to fall in love with an asset’s potential. Only then can you put yourself in the best possible position to make trades to maximize your team’s potential on and off of the court.