Are draft picks actually valuable or not? Our logic in determining the answer to this question is amazingly inconsistent.
How teams and analysts value NBA draft picks is so weird. When a team goes to trade a star player, the focus is on how many first-round picks they can gobble up. The allure of a future draft pick holds immense perceived value. This seems appropriate given the low wages and high team control afforded to teams who pick well in the draft. We should value these assets highly.
But then the draft actually comes around and the value judgments get very strange. Teams with higher picks are usually pretty bad (with some exceptions), and the way to get better quickly is typically to acquire a 26-year-old producer, not draft a 19-year-old.
So many teams in the lottery every year are trying to flip their pick for established players. Playoff teams, meanwhile, are often facing escalating payrolls and potential free-agent losses of their long-ago drafted players. They desire replenishing their roster with young players. So they try to get into the lottery, but without giving up too much. (What can they possibly give taking into account a mandate to keep winning?)
Thus, the draft becomes a bizarre confluence of only slightly compatible interests. A million trades get done every year, and that's a miracle. Most of them involve punting current picks into future ones. Only the teams with the first few picks are ever satisfied, and even then that's not always the case.
It gets even weirder once players are picked. The entire value calculus changes immediately. It's like driving a new car off the lot. By virtue of of being under your possession, it has lost value. As soon as a drafted player has a bad month, he's worth less than an equivalent draft pick.
Consider D'Angelo Russell, last year's No. 2 pick who had a trying season in Los Angeles. (As a Northern Californian who watched many friends move to L.A. over the years, this adjustment period is normal. He'll be fine.) There's no way Russell is worth more than the 2016 No. 2 pick on the market. The Lakers have driven him off the lot. He's known goods; the draft pick holds some mystery.
And because NBA general managers believe themselves to be good at their jobs, that mystery has value. Teams are more likely to believe they can divine out the best of a dozen available prospects than turn a decent prospect into a superstar. This is just another way (baseball analogy alert!) teams swing for the fences instead of taking the double. Maybe it's the right path, maybe not.
We spend so much effort teasing data points (real and imagined) out of these 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds as the draft approaches. When it's over, we assign winners and losers and dole out draft grades. (Draft grades: in which basketball writers reward teams who pick prospects the basketball writers themselves like and punish teams who pick prospects the basketball writers dislike. With that said, I'm writing draft grades on Friday.)
A year later, once we have some real data on the players picked, we chide the teams who made the wrong educated guess and very occasionally (only when it fits our broader view of a front office) commend the teams who made good choices. (An example: The Bulls have consistently been one of the best drafting teams in the league. But because Gar Forman and John Paxson have other legitimate flaws and aren't well-liked by the media, fans or really anyone, we withhold praise.)
A raw, poorly understood player like Marquese Chriss is going to get picked in the top eight on Thursday. No one knows whether that's going to work out for the team that takes him, including the team that takes him. Grand theses will be built around the team's foresight if he becomes a superstar. Venomous critiques will be lobbed should he become a bust. And every team will try their damnedest to get into the top 10 next year to do it all over again.
It's all so bizarre.
