The Road for Wiggins begins tomorrow night!!!

[D.o.s.]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nba/news/20130520/nba-draft-lottery-2013-odds-orlando-magic-charlotte-bobcats/

I thought folks needed to be reminded of the odds of getting the top pick in the draft.  Even for the very worst team, they go into lottery night with only a 25% chance at the number one pick.

And how much better is that 25% than a 1.5% or 1.7% chance?

And wouldn't you rather have a 25% chance at 1st, a 21% chance at second, and a 17.7% chance at third than, say, a 5%, 6%, and 7% chance at those same slots, like we had in 2006?

http://www.nba.com/history/lottery_probabilities.html

I'd rather watch the young players on this team develop as they make a push for the playoffs.

I'm with you on that. Just saying that the 25% chance factoid in isolation is a little bit misleading. One team has a 25% chance of getting the #1 pick, but the other teams are still dividing their picks up from the remaining 75%.

i.e. Portland's (#1 pick) 250 lottery balls out of 1000 is a lot nicer than Charlotte's  (#3 pick) 138, to use an example from the 06 draft. That's something that often gets swept under the rug when that figure is pulled up.

  Don't forget about the (historically) 10% or so chance that a #1 pick that you manage to get will win a title while he's still on your team.

Doesn't necessarily have to be a #1 pick. If you expand that list out to top 4 it gets much friendlier.


Where's that giant list you made of guys who won an NBA title in the last 20 years? Magic, Bird, Kobe, Duncan, Isaiah, Shaq  etc. Almost all of those guys were top 4 picks, and about half of them won a championship with the same team that drafted them (excepting Shaq and LeBron. And Kobe, if you really want to go by the letter).

Look at the Finals MVP award--most of those guys were drafted by those teams. Rick Barry & Walton are weird ones, owing to their ABA affiliation.
http://www.nba.com/history/finalsmvps.html

  Bird and Kobe weren't top 4. But expand to top 4 players instead of #1 players over the last 30 or so years and those 120 or so picks have probably yielded 5-6 players who led the team that drafted him to a title, so the 1 in 10 goes to 1 in 20 or so.

Out of players who have lead their teams to a title, most of them have been top four picks. Bird's a wonky exception, because of the territorial rights. Kobe's a proper exception, but his draft stock had a lot to do with his lack of collegiate level experience.

So while not all top four picks are players capable of leading a team to a championship, most players who are capable of leading their teams to championships are top 4 picks.

  None of what you said does anything to change the roughly 1 in 20 chance that you'll draft a player who will lead your team to a title with a top 4 pick.

1 in 20 is still significantly greater than 0 in 0.

So yes, while the odds of getting a franchise player are slim (shocker: there aren't many, there haven't been many, there won't be many), the odds of getting one outside the top end of the draft, in the draft, are exceedingly low.

Now, if you want to say that getting those kinds of players in free agency is a better bet, that's another thing all together.

[Mr October]

One down.

[playdream]

following the plan

[fitzhickey]

Not sure Philly will be as garbage as some predicted. I'm not saying that MCW will play like that often, not even occasionally. But they didn't look like a d-league team as some had expected.