Chad Ford: Excellent prognosticator or excellent talent evaluator?

[nickagneta]

It annoys me that one has to pay money to read Chad Ford's mock drafts.  I'll stick with Draft Express.

Amen. Having to pay to read subjective opinion about basketball players on the internet is ludicrous. I can't think of a parallel to this in any other sport.

Mel Kiper and Todd McShay....NFL

[AngryAndIrritable]

My bad. Don't really follow any other US sports.

[D.o.s.]

My bad. Don't really follow any other US sports.

Which might be why you had so much difficulty thinking up another example? 

[Celtics18]

I agree with everything you say about Exum, Nick.

I still like Saric, though. 

Bold Prediction:

Dario Saric has a better NBA career than Dante Exum.

[HomerSapien]

I agree with everything you say about Exum, Nick.

I still like Saric, though. 

Bold Prediction:

Dario Saric has a better NBA career than Dante Exum.

Saric is a guy I get more and more intrigued by every day.  Since about Jan/Feb my preference for anyone beyond the top 4 has been Vonleh, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that whoever gets Saric is going to be getting a player closer to the Manu, Pau, Parker type of international prospect and not the Tskitishvili, Korolev, Vasquez type. 

Unlike Exum, who there is limited exposure to, there is plenty of tape on Saric.  He already has accomplished a lot at the international level that many other Int'l NBA prospects typically have not, and it seems like the debate with Saric is mainly about WHEN he'll play in the NBA, not CAN he play in the NBA.

In particular, if there is a scenario where the C's drop down a few spots, pickup other assets, and draft Saric - I wouldn't hate it at all.

Even if he stays overseas 1 more year, that'd be one less developmental year the C's would have to pay for on his rookie contract (though I'd really hope for him to come over immediately).

[BballTim]

I know a lot of the posters on this board get 99% of their information about the NBA draft and the possible players that are going to be drafted from 2-3 sources: Chad Ford at ESPN, Draftexpress, and NBADraft.net. Now my opinions differ greatly on these sources from good to over-rated to bad but I want to discusss one individual in particular, Ford.

Ford gets a ton of credit in the NBA Draft reporting circles. He is very plugged into information from around the league with GMs, assistant GMs and scouts. But I think many times he gets credit for being a great talent evaluator. But is he?

Ford, for the most part, gets the players that are going to be selected in the first round of the draft slotted in areas that they are actually taken. I give him credit for that. But one of his ESPN Insider specialties is ranking the prospective players based on talent and has them numbered from 1-100.

So I ask, is Chad Ford a great talent evaluator and hence this is why he gets the mock drafts fairly close or is he just a person that can disseminate information very well and has an excellent network of people to gather that information from?

The reason I ask is because while he seems to get the order of the players drafted in a pretty close facsimile of what the actual draft looks like, he obviously then is making the same mistakes actual GMs are and has players taken way to high and way too low in his mock drafts. But even when compared to his top 100 player list, its still pretty much the same thing. There isn't a lot of difference between his mock drafts and his top 100 player rankings.

So which do you think it is. Is Ford just really plugged in and hence gets the players ranked in a pretty good order of where he thinks they will go based on that information or is he a very good talent evaluator that uses how good these players are and bases his mock drafts on the players' overall talent, but just gets a lot wrong when looked at how these players succeed or fail, once they start playing?

  It's hard to say he's good at evaluating talent without some evidence to back that up, like a fair amount of players in his rankings that significantly diverge from his mock draft order.