Applying my own example to what I'm saying from would yield something like GWB in 2000 was a stronger candidate than Bob Dole in 1996 because one won and the other did not.
Seems to check out to me (although ew).
Also, full disclosure the GWB thing isn't coming from left field, it's prompted by this article someone emailed me this morning:
http://www.theonion.com/article/george-w-bush-chuckles-to-self-upon-thinking-about-2811
Shouldn't it technically be coming out of right field 
? 
Ayyyyyyyy.
Right that's exactly my point. A bad prospect despite a high draft position would indicate, wait for it... a weak draft. 
And a bad prospect I feel is fairly self-evident: it's a person who is less likely to make an impact relative to the draft position at an NBA level than another.
So I guess my question is, what do you call a draft that was "weak" by your terms but ended up yielding plenty of star talent? E.g. 2009: Griffin, Curry, Harden, along with Derozan, Holiday, Lawson, and Teague.
So I would say that those players overachieved what was expected, but as a draft class it was middle of the road, IIRC. Lots of rotation caliber guards who blossomed, one obvious star (blake) who was also the only good big at the time of the draft. Obviously 2009 is special in that it overachieved, but you wouldn't confuse that with 2003, which was obviously a very special draft -- and everyone knew it going in.
Sorry, jumping a bit ramdomly into this debate haha
But I wouldn't necessarily agree with the above at all. If you look at historical drafts, there is almost ALWAYS a guy or two taken high in the draft who (after all is said and done) end up busts. That's true of even the greatest drafts.
Perfect example? Darko Milicic getting taken at #2 in 2003/04 - in what is considered by many to be the greatest draft class in history.
At the end of the day EVERYBODY in that draft wanted Milicic. Pretty much every team believed he has superstar written all over him, and I think pretty much every mock draft had him going in the top 3.
In fact, the way Milicic was viewed on draft day in 2003 was not unlike the way Embiid was viewed on draft day exactly 10 years later in 2013 - exception being Milicic to my knowledge had no health concerns.
Detroit gets mocked now, in hindsight, for choosing him so high. Reality is though that if they didn't choose him at #2 then he would have been chosen at #3 by Denver, at #4 by Toronto, or at #5 by Miami. All of those teams wanted him.
This is largely tangential to my point though. For example, even though Embiid is/was a bust because of injuries, he's still miles ahead of anyone drafted in 2013 assuming he stays healthy.
Which, again, goes back to the Bilas thing I mentioned earlier: if 2013 had started with a 5th or 6th pick, it would have been considered a deep draft. I have yet to see anyone comment on that?
Anyway good talk so far, TP's all around.
But...we don't know that because he hasn't played a single NBA minute.
Even if Embiid never got injured, there is no possible way for us to predict what type of production he would have had last season. You can 'guess' but that's really about it.
Especially when you consider that there have already been signs of him having questionable attitude and basketball IQ...he could been finished his rookie year no better than Darko Milicic or Michael Olowokandi.
That's the think - you don't know until after the fact. Draft predictions, for the most part, are not very accurate. I say this because from what I've seen MOST players do now end up becoming as good as their draft position suggested.
* In the top 10 of any given draft you might get 2 - 3 guys who end up stars, plus maybe another 2 - 3 guys who end up who end up good rotation players. There are usually at least 3 guys in the top 10 of any draft who end up either weak role players or complete busts. This tells you that at least about 30% of the guys who go in the top 10 fail to meet expectations by a significant margin.
* In the 11-19 positions you usually end up with at least one star or borderline star, plus at least 2-3 good starters, and always a couple of guys who are total busts. Again this goes against the predictions, which indicate that 11-19 is basically 'decent rotation player' range.
Similar deal with the 20-30 range.
If you look at all historic drafts on average, I would say that probably at least 10 players (out of 30 taken in the first round) would end up having wildly different careers to what their draft position would predict. If that's correct, then that's a whopping 30% of your entire first round prediction that's way off base.
So at the end of the day, what does a player's pre-draft analysis really tell you? I'd honestly say not much. It's a best-effort guess at the end of the day.
I really feel the NBA needs a better method for analysing draft picks, as I mentioned in another thread a few days back - I believe a player's chance to succeed is based on a LOT of factors. Physical attributes, mental attributes, the type of skills they possess, how developed they are in those skills, which school they went to, past success (i.e. have they played on championship teams), etc.
I feel that if you could back in history and capture a whole stack of this type of data for past and current players, then you should be able to use this (combined with hindsight knowledge of how much success those players had) in order to accurately predict how good a certain prospect is likely to become.
With all of today's technology (data mining, etc) I'm actually quite surprised that something like that has not (to my knowledge) been developed yet. We constantly hear people saying things like:
* Rebounding translates to the NBA better than most skills
* Bigs tend to develop slower than other players
* Guys with high basketball IQ tend to develop into at least solid rotation players
With a management system like what I've described above, you should be able to go beyond assumptions and actually generate large samples of statistical data that actually support or disprove statements like that.
