TNT’s Inside The NBA is great. They give great analysis, but they also like to joke around and bust balls. Kenny Smith has been on the recieving end lately, and the crew put together an awesome “Where Amazing Happens” playoff video:
Good stuff.
It is about time we start concentrating on the draft, I wanted to get to all of this stuff a lot sooner, but with the whole Lawrence Frank saga, this stuff took a back seat.
The Draft Lottery. It is an interesting and widely known concept, but many people are still confused about how it works. For example, only the first three picks are determined by the lottery, the other 11 are based on record. So for the Nets, we have 7 possibilites:
So how are the top three picks determined? Well, to determine the winner, fourteen ping pong balls numbered 1–14 are placed in a standard lottery machine and four balls are randomly selected from the lot. Just as in most traditional lotteries, the order in which the numbers are drawn is not important. That is, 1-2-3-4 is considered to be the same as 4-3-2-1. So although there is a total of 24 orders in which the balls numbered 1-2-3-4 can be picked, they are all treated as the same outcome. In doing this, the permutation of 4 balls from 14 becomes the combination of 4 balls from 14. That is, the total of 24,024 (14! / 10!, or 14x13x12x11) possible permutations is reduced by a factor of 24, to 1,001 combinations. Of these, 1 outcome is disregarded and 1,000 outcomes are distributed among the 14 non-playoff NBA teams. The combination 11-12-13-14 (in any order that those numbers are drawn) is not assigned and it is ignored if drawn; this has never occurred in practice. Here are the number of combinations each team gets:
- 250 combinations, 25.0% chance of receiving the #1 pick
- 199 combinations, 19.9% chance
- 156 combinations, 15.6% chance
- 119 combinations, 11.9% chance
- 88 combinations, 8.8% chance
- 63 combinations, 6.3% chance
- 43 combinations, 4.3% chance
- 28 combinations, 2.8% chance
- 17 combinations, 1.7% chance
- 11 combinations, 1.1% chance
- 8 combinations, 0.8% chance
- 7 combinations, 0.7% chance
- 6 combinations, 0.6% chance
- 5 combinations, 0.5% chance
Here are the odds for each seed to get specific picks if there were no ties:
So we got a 2.9% chance to get a top three pick. I like those odds…
*Thanks to newark hawk who made this little correction in the comments!
82games.com is a fantastic site. If you are a stat-head and you don’t know about it, you probably sleep under a rock. That, or you don’t have the internet. Even though I am not too big of a stat-head (I am getting there though – reading Basketball On Paper by Dean Oliver), I still check the site pretty much every day. That’s how I noticed their NBA Player Development “Mini-Series” which is really interesting.
Among the topics that they covered, Draft Performance by Year, Which College Conferences Deliver?, Performance of NBA drafted players by College, Best/Worst value picks, Best/Worst Drafting Teams, and Expected Performance by Draft Pick Number. I am going to be taking a look at that last one.
Expected Performance by Draft Pick Number:
82 games uses the following formula to determine a players rating:
Rating = points/game + rebounds/game + assists/game
After that he then breaks down each pick into categories:
The possible picks we will be making are 14,13,12,11 or 1,2,3 (I will be getting to this later today). Obviously we want to be in the later group. Statistically speaking with a top 3 pick, we will be getting a contributor guaranteed (A role player is the worst case scenario). If we pick where we will be more than likely picking, it turns into a crap-shoot pretty much. The percentage of getting a bench warmer is almost the same as getting a contributor.
What does this mean? Well, we need to be smart about our pick (sorta like last year). Especially with the way the team is set up, we need someone who is going to be able to contribute right away. We can’t be picking potential. At least not this year.