<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Astral @ Jun 22 2008, 09:19 PM)
<{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Dumpy @ Jun 22 2008, 07:57 PM)
<{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Astral @ Jun 22 2008, 06:18 PM)
<{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Dumpy, I agree with most of the things you said. I also saw the article on DX that showed the success rates of drafted players. My problem with that article is that the data is not broken down into Why the players were taken. Before last year, you could draft high schoolers, and as you know, many teams did take younger players. The other item is that even if the prospect is not a high schooler, sometimes he is taken simply based on potential (ex. Patrick O'Bryant). There were a lot of raw big men who were taken early in the lottery because they were such "awesome raw speciments".
This is absolutely not the case with Brook Lopez. This prospect already shows a polished post game as well as is mature and intelligent. Despite this he still JUST turned 20. There are not many offensively polished big men who still have potential.
When people speak of potential, they usually hope that a physically gifted person develops a certain degree of basketball skill. Sometimes, these players develop well, other times they don't. Brook Lopez is a completely different sort of player. He is average athletically, and he never will be a great athlete. However, he can become a much more skilled player. He already shows maturity and work ethic to have a polished offensive game. He can learn to hold good defensive post position, he can learn to box out and rebound well, he can learn to shoot the mid-range J, or the sky hook (I know, I wish).
I'm as big a fan of statistical analysis as anyone, but sometimes it just doesn't fit. Using something like "big men taken at the end of the lottery have the same chance to become productive players as big men taken in the late 1st round" is just too general to apply to a scenario when you only have one pick in the lottery.</div>
I can't deny that something is lost when you stop treating players as individuals. However, it is tellilng that big men appear to be consistently overpicked, at least as far as their eventual impact in the league goes, especially compared to wings.
And again, how much better will Brook Lopez be than Roy Hibbert? To me, that is a fundamental question that must be considered BY THE NETS, given the fact that they have two picks.
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That's the thing with guards though. There are absolutely no guards who are picked based on their "raw athletic potential". When guards are picked, they are skillful. When it comes to big men, a lot of hype is generated about Player X because he's so awesome physically. Teams basically out think one another about what the player CAN turn into. This leads into an earlier team drafting that raw prospect. A lot of the physically raw big men go in the middle of the lottery.
Basically, a team that is picking in its 20s says "look, we're not going to get an impact player immediately, and we're already pretty good. Let's take someone with potential". They go scout this player. Another GM finds out about this and goes to look at this raw prospect themselves. It starts a chain reaction. Teams start treating this person as someone who's going in the 20s. When they get an idea of the player's potential they all exclaim "WOW! This is the next franchise big man! Look at him!". He becomes a consensus Top 15 pick. Then during the measurements camp the man jumps out of the gym and does excellent on the agility drills. Guess what? Another team looks at him and decides that he's worth a shot at the #8 (for ex) spot.
It's almost as if there is no middle ground for raw prospects. Either a prospect is so awesome that he goes in the Top 10, or he goes in the middle of the second round. Raw big men don't get drafted in the 20s.
Actually it's the same with the international big men prospects. When there's an international sensation, he gets all the hype and gets squished into the lottery, despite the fact that most of the teams didn't see him. When they bring him in for a workout (if they do), they usually fall in love with their length, height and "skill". This myth of "skilled" European big men usually means that at least one gets drafted in the Top 15 year after year. Most of them don't pan out. Even those who pan out turn into mediocre players. Outliers such as Nowitzki are very rare. Probably one every 10 years.
This is how the data gets skewered. Because a player who was SUPPOSED to go somewhere in the 20s got picked at #8 or #9. If they re-did the analysis after taking out every PURELY "raw" project and "skilled" international prospect, the playing field would be equalized, and I guarantee you'd see that a much larger percentage of the late lottery big men perform much better than late first round ones.
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This happens every year in every draft and is factored into the D/X analysis.
