NBA Draft analysis is a major focus of many Swish Theory writers. But we aim to not evaluate players and their skills in a vacuum, but also assess attributes with an eye to how the NBA game is played and team-building works in practice.
Our second roundtable will be focusing on just that: if you ran a front office, how would you establish your draft philosophy? To keep things simple for now, we’re placing at one end of the spectrum drafting for fit and the other drafting purely for best player. Our participants picked their philosophy from a menu of five options:
- Best Player Available Only
- Preference for Best Player
- Equal Consideration for Best Player and Best Fit
- Preference for Best Fit
- Best Fit Only
While our crew definitely leaned more in one direction than the other, there remain a wide range of opinions as to why and to what degree, with one writer even taking the nuclear option on the prompt.
Without further ado, see below for how Swish Theory contributors put their draft philosophy into context.
Chip Jones: 1 – BPA Only
Few things frustrate me more than seeing a prospect I loved stuck at the end of the bench as the team that just drafted them fails to find them minutes. But as much as it hurts me to admit, a simple statistical breakdown of previous drafts strongly suggests that teams should focus on drafting the best player available regardless of team fit.
We want to focus on players who have a.) played enough time in the NBA that we can at least somewhat confidently decide how good they really are, and b.) have been drafted recently enough that the NBA they played in is similar to the current NBA environment. I think six full seasons is a good enough sample size for requirement A, and let’s stick to players drafted in 2010 or later as a requirement for B.
We need to gauge players by degrees of performance: starters, role players, and busts. And we’re going to need some rules to make these groupings objective:
- To qualify as a starter the player must have 6 seasons in which they started at least 50% of the games they were available.
- For role players we’ll drop that requirement to 6 seasons of at least 15 minutes per game.
- Players who fail to meet either requirement will be placed into the bust group.
In our 2010 to 2016 window there were 7 drafts with a total of 420 players selected.
Now, 105 of those players were taken between picks 46 and 60. And of those 105 players, 43 have never logged a single NBA minute, while only 4 meet our role player requirements and only a single player (Isaiah Thomas) qualified as a starter. Given that these players are so unlikely to make any impact whatsoever it feels wrong to factor in their outcomes with the other 315 drafted players. So for the purpose of this exercise we won’t be including those selected after pick 45.
Now narrowing in on what we can consider high draft picks, let’s analyze our remaining 315 NBA hopefuls. Among our sample, 62 (or 20%) went on to become NBA starters, giving us an average of 9 starters per draft. A further 72 or 23% have contributed as role players, an average of 10 players a year. With that in mind, less than half of the first 45 players selected in a given draft will actually stick in the league long-term. We can go one step further by separating players selected in the lottery from those taken in the mid to late 1st and early 2nd round.
Of our 62 starters, a strong majority were lotto selections at 39 (63%). With that in mind, just 1 in 10 players taken between picks 15 and 45 will go on to become starters. When it comes to our 72 role players, exactly half heard their name called in the lottery. That number means roughly 1 in 6 of our non-lottery sample size will enjoy a successful NBA career as a role player.
Draft picks hold a lot of value, and given that less than half of the players selected in the first 45 picks end up providing long-term impact, it feels unwise to limit your pool of potential picks to only those who fit a specific team need.
Neema Djavadzadeh: 3 – BPA/Fit Mix
It’s hard to say BPA past the first 4-5 guys in a draft most of the time, because after you get to a certain point, a lot of the players are very similar in terms of impact on the court. Where they differ is their individual skill sets, and some intangibles that as an armchair scout, it is hard to know about. I believe that all 30 teams have (and should have) different draft philosophies because all 30 teams have different personnel and priorities. “KYP” or “Know Your Personnel” is often used when talking about who to put on the court, but I think it applies come draft time too.
For example, if your team just drafted a scoring guard last year with a high pick, it may not be a great idea to draft another scoring guard right after that. Additionally, say you don’t have any coaches who are primed for big man development. Drafting a raw big man who may be considered BPA in the late lottery might not be the best selection for your team. At the end of the day it is about building a long-term roster, and if you don’t see how other important pieces on your team can mesh with a potential draftee, or how you can develop him to do so, then it may not be worth drafting said player.
As I said earlier, I think when you get to a certain point, a lot of the players are similar in impact, and it’s about finding which player will have the most opportunity to make an impact on your team. That’s why I believe in focusing more on tiers than on specific rankings on players. If you have a guy who is a tier ahead of everyone else left on your board but may not fit your roster or personnel immediately, go ahead and draft him! He’s clearly the best player available and you consider him to be at a different level than other prospects, so it’s worth it! But if everybody left on your board is of the same tier, it’s good to look for who fits your team’s personnel best, not just on the court right now, but with the locker room, with the coaching staff, and the team you envision building in the future. More often than not, the Best Player Available is whoever is the best player for your team, not who is the most talented.
Larry Golden: 2 – BPA Preferred
This question brings up many thoughts depending on context. For instance, if I am the Boston Celtics I am probably going to pick a prospect that has the right skillset to help our team today. But if I’m the Indiana Pacers I may take a swing at BPA to see if I can knock that pick out of the park.
I just truly think your organization’s draft process should be dictated by your current player and team’s success. If you already have a high volume scoring guard why draft another? I think you want to complement your roster with skillsets that offer different styles of play, but coincides with all your players. I also think you have to take into account what does your player development department do well? Have you noticed that your players are improving in shooting metrics month to month or every couple months? If so, why not take a shot on a player like a Jeremy Sochan, for instance? Choose a player that has the intangibles and displays intelligence on both end of the floor, but maybe the shooting could be better.
Your development staff over time will show you what they are good at improving in your drafted players. Why not use that data to help you decipher between BPA and fit?
Avinash Chauhan: 1 – BPA Only
My issue with the BPA versus best fit debate is that there are implicit provisions that are a bit underdiscussed. When drafting for best player available, there needs to be a requisite level of organizational trust in the ranking capacity of each team. The framework of analysis needs to be robust, in that a successful draft scouting mechanism can be replicated every season. Of course, this is highly dependent on the organization, and may not be possible as industry standard.
But on the contrary, proponents of the “best fit” proposition suggest a baseline of roster continuity – the foundation of the team will remain for the foreseeable future. While roster continuity has improved over the last few years, this is still quite a relevant confounding factor. “Best fit” also requires a requisite level of organizational trust in its ranking capacity: you need to trust that your projections are pristine, and then also compare prospect projections to determine which prospect would most effectively mesh with your team’s current talent.
So, we’ve established the following: BPA relies on 1.) Trust in the team’s eval. Best fit, meanwhile, relies on all of 1.) Trust in the team’s eval, 2.) Deciding which of the projected evals would mesh best with the core, and 3.) Relative faith in the roster for the near-future. This is the basis for my fundamental pitch of BPA: it’s the probabilistically correct decision. For the sake of the year-to-year variability in the league, give me the option with fewer variables.
Fit is a nebulous concept, but I’m defining fit here as team fit – considering how well the team can integrate the drafted player into their lineup. Considering the developmental strengths and training bandwidth of the organization seems relatively intuitive: for example, the Raptors and Spurs have demonstrated a propensity for developing shooting in wings (let’s ignore that shooting dev is perhaps the most “elastic” skill acquisition endeavor). Still, I don’t consider developmental strengths a true function of fit because it’s personnel-dependent and thus not organizationally intrinsic.
Additionally, I personally believe that feasible skill dev is casually deterministic. In other words, players showcase varying propensities to develop skills such as shooting, and it is up to the organization to find those players and tap into their developmental strengths to allow those players to become the best (shooting/skilled) versions of themselves. As an example, Kawhi Leonard, often considered one of the great skill development cases, had high FT% + a ton of self-created long 2’s, indicating a propensity to develop off-the-dribble shooting later. Judging the skill acquisition and refinement potential of prospects seems far more BPA-esque, especially since this process is similarly not intrinsic to each team.
Two more concepts that make me such a firm believer in BPA:
First, I think it’s hard to truly manufacture poor team fits in the draft. From the CP3-Harden rockets to ‘21 Nets, the idea that “there’s only one ball” is incredibly ignorant of the lineup versatility enabled by the sheer concentration of talent. I think you can probably pair any combination of players who can consistently draw defensive rotations. There are reasonable limits (don’t construct the 2022 Lakers), but oftentimes the well-roundedness of a team to meet the minimum offensive and defensive thresholds of goodness can be attained in free agency. Also, while there are some extreme cases (taking a traditionally low Expected-Value archetype high in the draft while already employing a high-level player of that archetype, like taking an undersized guard top 5 on a team with Trae Young), even those cases tend to work out. Darius Garland was drafted a year after Collin Sexton, and Anfernee Simons was drafted to a team with Dame and CJ. Five years later, they are both the lead guards for their respective teams. The concept of constantly drafting the best player available and seeing what sticks may not be the most asset-productive move in the short-term, but ultimately the players that adjust the best to the NBA ecosystem end up returning far over expected value. Note that I am not supporting a Darwinian-aligned view of player dev, but instead optimistically believe in the culmination of the intrinsic “dawg” + existing bundles of potential skill. Another side note: dev-locking (ex. Josh Christopher right now for the Rockets) happens too but that’s usually a byproduct of drafting too many players in a single cycle.
Finally, predicting skill dev is extremely hard. Especially in this era of ball-handling wings and position-less schema, there are increasing cases of outlier development and miscalculations of potential. That does not mean you conflate “take the best player available” with “shoot for the moon and find the next Giannis!!”; Instead, scouting departments need to research the underlying skill, neuropsychological, and athletic traits of outlier development, and find players who rank highest based on a holistic evaluation of their potential. Taking the highest ceiling is not the same thing as taking the best player – and it’s incredibly reductive to make that assumption. BPA can be an innately nuanced process without considering team-context. Consistently drafting players who have the highest probabilities of commanding defensive rotations may be a personal philosophy at its core, but I truly believe BPA is more probabilistically viable than conducting the same exact eval process and then strictly trusting your projections to conduct an additional decision-making process that determines which of the players would best fit the current roster. That doesn’t even include the overlying “best-fit” assumption of roster continuity.
Tyler Wilson: 0 – None of the Above
I have found the debate surrounding the strategy of drafting for BPA vs. fit to be, generally speaking, lacking nuance. I really don’t like thinking about drafting through this lens because the answer is so dependent on context: every team around the league has a different set of confounding factors that alter who is the best selection at each draft slot and boiling that calculus down to BPA or Fit feels hyper-simplified to a fault.
What do these terms even mean? What definition of “best” are you using? Is it the player with the highest ceiling, the greatest odds of hitting a positive outcome or the lowest odds of failing? How do you define “fit”? Is it on-court fit with the players on the roster, the fit within the timeline for contention of the team, the fit with what the team is best developing or the fit with other core pieces already in place?
Basketball scouting and team building at large is a beautiful mess of inputs unique to each team, trying to boil that down into six letters seems insane to me. Yes, there is nuance and substance that can be brought to this topic, many of my colleagues writing here have done so, but is this really a conversation we need to have every draft cycle? This debate writ large is one of people attempting to cram a basketball worldview into a three letter word that means… nothing?
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are so many more interesting and informative ways to talk about team building. There are 30 different teams you can develop substantive and unique opinions on, there is no reason to project one overarching draft philosophy to every team around the league. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why am I writing for this roundtable? Why am I yelling at my keyboard in the dead of night?
For nearly every draft pick, the growth into a functional NBA player is done in the league, within the context of the organization that drafts them. The best player available to a team is the player that will provide the largest on-court impact over the course of their career. That inherently depends on their fit within the franchise, from the coaching staff to roster construction and player development staff (on an even broader level, the willingness of said player to remain with the team and city that drafted them). BPA means Best Player Available FOR THAT FRANCHISE. You can’t separate the two, they are dependent upon one another. We’re all just saying the same thing in different ways.
AJ Carter: 2 – BPA Preferred
There’s definitely arguments for both sides in terms of drafting for the best player available vs. drafting for fit, but I lean mostly towards drafting BPA. At the end of the day you’re looking to get the best value possible with your draft pick, and in most cases taking the guys at the absolute top of your board is the best way to do that. Even if the fit is questionable and you have to make a tough decision down the line, the most important thing is to take a player you think is going to be good and you can figure the rest out from there.
That doesn’t mean that fit just doesn’t matter at all, however, as that’s inherently tied to getting the player with the best chance to pan out for your team specifically. For example if you’re a team with a deep guard rotation full of established players, drafting the high upside yet raw 19 year old point guard might not be the best idea if you aren’t in a position to get them on the floor and let them play through mistakes – even if you’re a big believer in said player’s talent.
It generally matters less with older and more polished prospects that already know what type of player they’re going to be in the NBA compared to younger prospects that need a certain type of developmental structure. So at the end of the day, yes, you should be drafting the best player available, just through the lens of your specific team’s structure and developmental context.
Danny Johnson: 2 – BPA Preferred
Like many instances in life, there’s so many factors for front office personnel to evaluate draft-wise. In such instances, applying general blanket statements is both unfair and irresponsible. With that being said, I’d lean towards the “best player available” side of this argument, but it’s largely circumstantial.
I believe that drafts are almost never won on the night of the draft, but they can be lost. Most instances where drafts are lost on draft night stems from sacrificing “value” to reach for what teams perceive to be the best fit. As we know, value is far from linear in the NBA Draft. The difference between pick #10 and pick #15 is way larger than the difference between pick #40 and pick #45. The larger the margins are of perceived value, the less teams should be willing to take chances with a fit-based selection. A recent example of this that comes to mind is back from the 2020 NBA Draft. Following the magical ride that was the Bubble Suns, the front office and ownership felt it was time to compete (and they were right), so they went out and traded for perennial All-Star point guard Chris Paul to fortify their starting lineup that now looked like this:
Chris Paul, Devin Booker, Mikal Bridges, Jae Crowder, DeAndre Ayton
A rock solid five. Looking over the bench, they had options to fill out the guard and wing spots with Cameron Johnson, Cameron Payne, Abdel Nader, E’Twaun Moore, Jevon Carter, and Langston Galloway. Were holdovers from the 2019-2020 roster in Dario Saric and Frank Kaminsky enough to stabilize the frontcourt? James Jones and the Phoenix Suns front office didn’t seem to think so. When draft night came around the Phoenix Suns selected Maryland big man Jalen Smith with the 10th overall pick, a surprise to many at the time as Smith typically fell somewhere in the 20s on most evaluators boards. When asked the next morning whether it was a fit-based selection, Jones had this to say:
“It’s always about fit for us. You know it’s never just purely about talent. You cultivate talent, you build, you mold, you shape talent until you find the fit that you’re looking for. This team, the way we’re constructed, the way we play, we tend towards fit and if that means taking a guy that no one thinks should be taken at a slot, we live with that cause we know our ultimate goal is to build the best team.”
(per the Doug & Wolf show on Arizona Sports radio)
Phoenix went on to basically punt on Jalen Smith. Trading him (less than 16 months after drafting him) and a 2nd round pick to the Pacers to reacquire Torrey Craig, whom they had traded for during the 2020-21 season and let walk in free agency just a few months prior. I apologize to Suns fans in advance, but the player many had thought made sense with the 10th selection at the time was Iowa State guard Tyrese Haliburton because of his clear talent. Outside of Haliburton, there were a few other guys that could’ve helped in Devin Vassell, Cole Anthony, Saddiq Bey, Tyrese Maxey, and Jaden McDaniels. Instead, management decided to take their swing at a big man in a class that was widely considered to be thin at the position. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, but most would agree at the time that the selection was an iffy one made to attempt to plug a hole on the roster.
But make no mistake: being able to effectively deploy the “best player available” strategy is far from straightforward. Even if you had a tangible way to determine the actual best basketball player at the time of draft night, you’d still fail to get the best player a majority of the time. This is because development is far from linear and there’s no handbook on exactly how to maximize a player’s potential.
With that being said, front offices still have the ability to evaluate talent and make their best inferences. There’s a reason we often see a largely-consensus opinion towards the top of big boards, and, no, that reason is not always media group-think. It’s because there’s prospects that come out each year and clearly have these rare, sometimes generational abilities to do certain things on the basketball court. It only makes sense that I stay in the 2020 draft class for an example. This team’s two leading scorers a season ago were 24-and-25-year-old point guards, both of whom the team had control of for at least two more seasons. This team was the Charlotte Hornets who sat at pick #3 in a class that was considered to have a fairly consensus big-3. When it came their time to pick, the only member of the big-3 left was point guard LaMelo Ball, and they didn’t hesitate to side with the talent despite the current roster makeup, selecting the only player from the draft class who’s made an All-Star game thus far. When teams have opportunities to draft players with these special abilities, you take the talent and figure out the fit later (especially because if you have the opportunity to select these guys it normally means you weren’t great the year before anyways, so who cares if the fit doesn’t make the most sense at the moment).
However, like I alluded to earlier, I believe the prompt is rather circumstantial. As drafts progress, the talent disparity becomes thinner and thinner, sometimes to the point where evaluators can spend weeks on end focused on two different players, but still end up unsure who the better prospect is. These are the instances in which fit matters. Again, I’ll stay in the 2020 NBA Draft for an example. Tyrell Terry was a blossoming freshman at the University of Stanford who showed flashes of brilliance with the ball in his hands. He became a draft darling for many, even pushing towards some people’s top 10. With him still sitting on the board at the end of the first round, the Memphis Grizzlies decided to pass knowing that they already had a lead guard who was dynamic with the ball in his hands named Ja Morant. What they wanted was someone who could provide value in areas that were perceived to be Morant’s weakest. So the Grizzlies decided to take a sharpshooting, defensive-minded guard that also fit in wonderfully age-wise with Memphis’ “window,” his name was Desmond Bane.
Gannon Rice: 3 – BPA/Fit Mix
At the end of the day, the goal in the draft is to select the player that generates the most positive impact for YOUR team, with your specific infrastructure (system, personnel, developmental team, etc.). Each pick is an estimate of the combined value of the player’s raw ability and improvement indicators (BPA), along with your team’s ability to mold and integrate that player into one that can reach their highest potential (fit).
The unpredictability of a player’s outcome is what makes drafting perfect a near impossibility. You have to make a decision based on the stability of your team, and the chances that drafting someone with the idea that they would fit with your infrastructure now is even a possibility 3-5 years later. If you have a coach who’s on the hot seat and has a specific system he plays with, drafting a player who you hope is able to get in that system probably isn’t the best choice. Knowing your title- and playoff-contention windows is critical when making a choice between two players with different developmental curves.
In the short term, when looking at the development of the player in the first couple years, how he will be prioritized is monumental, and this is through both from how the coaches utilize him and how much the developmental team can work on him. There may not be adequate scenarios to draft a player if you believe their positive impact to your team relies on specific playstyles and developmental work, when your team may have players with conflicting archetypes and needing of development as well. That’s where the importance of stability is so crucial to knowing what may change in the future that can open up or close the doors for the prospect you want.
Every team in the NBA has a unique roster, culture, success window, developmental team, and coaching staff. Those operate in distinct but connective ways, and the best way to make the right pick is having a full understanding of the capabilities of each one of the components. An aspect I haven’t touched on is off the court, as you’re not just drafting a basketball player, you are drafting the person. Keeping that human element in mind will only assist you to make the right choice!
Matt Powers: 2 – BPA Preferred
I am all for best player available, with the assumption that we have the broadest possible definition of “best player” and adequate resources to support that player’s playing style. Naturally, the earlier you pick in the draft the more flexibility you will have to accommodate this, with more restrictions towards the end of the order with win-now teams. However, due to the unpredictable nature of the draft, extreme, unexpected values per pick may pop up at any given run of selections, and having a “BPA-first” approach allows you to potentially find a very good player no matter where your selections land.
The fit part comes in as there are often, and maybe just short of always, not just one good player who falls unexpectedly, but multiple. Take, for example, Detroit’s acquisition of pick #13 in the 2022 draft. On my personal board I had both AJ Griffin and Jalen Duren as extremely positive values for that pick slot, with Griffin a preference within that same tier. While AJG would be a good fit with Detroit as well (he’s good), Duren’s potential as a lob threat and pick and roll partner for Cade Cunningham made him a top 5 option for me on a Pistons-specific board.
Basketball is an extremely dynamic sport where as good players become great ones they almost always naturally improve in their fit with the rest of your team. It is very difficult to find an outright bad fit among any two or three All-Star level players, but due to the delicate nature of player development, there are indeed trade-offs for giving one player more reps in a certain context than another. Great players often make their own path to being great, but there have been countless examples of misused players on first contracts that then figure it out in a more appropriate context with another team later. Landing a star from any given spot in the draft goes a long way to improving your org’s title odds, but increasing the odds of a player finding his fit regardless of whether he becomes a true star or not has its value as well. The secondary benefits (chemistry, freedom of creativity within a given lane, clarity of role) of young players complementing each other as well should not be ignored.
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