NBA HD: Leveling the Draft

It helps to follow multiple sports.  I download a ton of analytical ideas from baseball’s sabermetric community, which is admittedly light-years ahead of basketball’s analytical field.

One of the concepts that I’ve applied to basketball comes from Beyond the Box Score, a must-read site for basketball analysis that I’ve been digging for a couple years now.  It’s their WAR graphs (seen here) that have me and the rest of the sabermetric community going buck-wild.  Today, FanGraphs, the infotastic site for advanced baseball stats, debuted their own adaptation of the BtB’s WAR graphs, allowing the reader to pick and choose their own players to compare.

What are WAR graphs? They compare player careers by charting their best seasons, as measured by Wins Above Replacement (WAR), in descending order to create a career arc.  It tightly consolidates lots of information about a player’s career.

I’d like to present my own version of the WAR graphs that looks at the NBA.  But instead of player careers, I’m looking at NBA Draft talent.  You often hear about a draft class being particularly deep or top-heavy but do we ever follow up on that prognosis? Let’s do that now.

Here’s a BtB-type graph that looks at the talent level of each draft, as measured by EWA, John Hollinger’s WAR equivalent for the NBA.

That’s a colorful bowl of spaghetti, no?  Each line represents a draft class distribution of talent from their best player (as measured by yearly EWA) down to the 30th best player.  It’s probably information overload for some but we’ll shorten the invitation list later in the post.  But let’s go through this one.

If you were to look up “top-heavy” in the dictionary, you’d either find a picture of Stewie Griffin or the 2003 draft class.  LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, and Chris Bosh were all drafted in that year, not to mention players like David West, Kirk Hinrich, Josh Howard and Chris Kaman who were selected in 2003 as well.  But after Bosh, the talent level drops off and flattens out around the 8th best player.

Looking for the deepest draft? That would be 1999′s draft class, represented by the hollow blue line.  Elton Brand was the top overall pick in that year and also owns the highest yearly EWA among 1999 draftees, but his 13 yEWA doesn’t stand out among the other classes.  You can see the blue hollow line nestled underneath the several classes on the far left.  But listen to this roll call of talent: Shawn Marion, Manu Ginobili, Andre Miller, Jason Terry, Baron Davis, Andrei Kirilenko, Steve Francis, Lamar Odom, Rip Hamilton, Corey Maggette, and Ron Artest.  That’s why you see the hollow blue line’s elbow out in the open at the 12th best player.

All that depth in 1999 drained the talent pool of the following class of 2000 in the hollow orange.  Only one player (Michael Redd) averaged more than 5 yEWA in the NBA while the 1999 class featured 12 such players.  2000 not only had incredibly shallow depth at the top but it remained shallow throughout the draft.  The twelfth best player of the 1999 draft by this measure is starting for the championship favorites this year (Ron Artest) while the twelfth best player in the 2000 draft is starting the NBA unemployment line (Speedy Claxton).

So these are the different shapes of the NBA draft.  Want to ease the eyes and look at just the past 10 years of drafts?

Once again, the 2000 class does it’s best impression of the Jolly Green Giant.  No difference in this trimmed graph.  But now, we get a clearer look at the talent distribution of last year’s draft class.  Blake Griffin’s return from injury and Ricky Rubio’s Western migration will probably pick this class up a bit down the road so it at least has an excuse for its shallow depth.  As is, it’s probably too early to assess the class as a whole.  We saw what a year’s grind did to Goran Dragic, Russell Westbrook, Robin Lopez, and George Hill.  We’ll check back in next year.

What will 2010′s class look like?  The experts suggest this year’s draft is filled with talent top-to-bottom.  If that’s the case, you’ll probably see a talent distribution much like 2005 with John Wall taking the spot of Chris Paul.  Notice the blue dotted line on the first graph and how it sits on top of the others.  That’s what it looks like to have a widely dispersed talent pool.

For more in-depth draft stuff, check out the D.R.A.F.T. Initiative series I ran at ESPN Insider last year.  You can find it on the ESPN NBA Draft frontpage at the bottom.