ANALYSIS: Don’t count your superstars before they hatch
In his day job, ProfessorB is an award-winning social scientist. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major media outlets. But he also dabbles in NetsWorld. With Tuesday night’s blockbuster trades, the Brooklyn Nets have picked a direction, and it’s downward. They traded their stash of Phoenix Suns and Dallas Mavericks draft picks acquired in the 2023 sell-off of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving for control of their own 2025 and 2026 picks, which had been sent to the Houston Rockets as part of the James Harden trade back in 2021. Lest anyone doubt their intention to tank, they also dumped their best player and putative “face of the franchise,” Mikal Bridges, for journeyman Bojan Bogdanovic and a bunch of additional picks from the New York Knicks.
With little or no chance of fielding a competitive team for the next two seasons, fans’ focus will naturally turn to hopes and dreams for the future. The prospect of drafting stars in 2025 and 2026—rebuilding from the ground up—will have to compensate for a lot of ugly losses at Barclays Center in the months to come. But just how big should we be dreaming? (Personally, I’m opposed to tanking as a matter of principle and ashamed of “my” team for stooping to being intentionally bad. But I recognize that most fans don’t share that scruple and are only interested in how much we can expect in the way of future success.)
Any assessment of the likely benefit of tanking must begin with the translation of records into draft lottery odds. That correspondence is looser than it used to be, because the NBA wants to discourage teams from intentionally losing. The team with the worst record is guaranteed a top-five pick, but has only a 14% chance of getting the top pick. Moreover, with a handful of teams tanking every season, aiming for the worst record does not guarantee “achieving” it. The lottery odds got worse for teams finishing outside the bottom five. For example, the sixth-worst team has only a 37% chance of getting a top-five pick. But in a spirit of “optimism,” let’s assume that a tanking Nets team would end up with the average lottery odds associated with the five worst records—a 50-50 chance of a top-four pick, with a 30% chance of landing outside the top five.
The next question is what any of those picks might be expected to turn into. Draft analysts have used historical data in various ways to tabulate the likely productivity of players in any given draft slot. In this case, given how much the Nets have staked on tanking, the chances of getting a rotation player seem less relevant than the chances of getting a future star.
Basketball Reference provides two good measures of high-level professional success: All-Star selections and votes received for All-NBA honors. Here, I’ll assess each player based on those metrics in the eight years after he was drafted. For players picked in 2025 and 2026, that should provide a reasonable estimate of their star potential well into the 2030s, through their first and second contracts.
Looking at eight-year records requires focusing on players drafted before 2017. To generate a reasonably large sample of outcomes, I’ll consider the 99 top-nine picks drafted between 2006 and 2016, with statistical smoothing across draft slots to produce more reliable results. Here are the resulting expectations for each draft slot in an average-quality draft.
Weighting these potential outcomes by the probability of ending up in each draft slot, the expectations for a player selected by a bottom-five team are 1.18 All-Star selections (with a 35% chance of making at least one All-Star team) and 40 All-NBA vote shares over eight seasons. The player closest to that profile drafted in 2006-2016 is Julius Randle, who made one All-Star team and garnered 51 All-NBA vote shares in his first eight seasons. Jaylen Brown and Brandon Roy, who made three All-Star teams in his injury-shortened career, are more optimistic but not unrealistic examples of expected production for a bottom-five team in an average draft. Al Horford and Andre Drummond are less optimistic but similarly realistic projections.
Scouts and analysts have suggested that the 2025 draft will be much better than average. If it turns out to be as good as the 2009 draft—which produced Steph Curry, James Harden, Blake Griffin, and DeMar DeRozan among the top nine picks—the expectations for each draft slot will be considerably higher.
In that good a draft, the overall expectations for a player selected by a bottom-five team are 2.18 All-Star selections (with a 49% chance of making at least one All-Star team) and 107 All-NBA vote shares over eight seasons. The players closest to that profile drafted in 2006-2016 are Kevin Love (3 All-Star selections and 107 All-NBA vote shares in his first eight seasons), Joakim Noah (2 All-Star selections and 99 All-NBA vote shares), and Derrick Rose (3 All-Star selections and 110 All-NBA vote shares before suffering a devastating injury in his fourth season).
An optimistic interpretation of these projections is that Nets fans can expect a short and successful rebuild. Draft a Kevin Love in 2025, a Julius Randle in 2026, add some complimentary pieces through trades or free agency, and watch the wins begin to accumulate. However, it is worth bearing in mind that most young players don’t succeed immediately. Love finished 7th in All-Rookie vote shares and only began to thrive in his third season. Randle was an even slower starter, making his first All-Star team in his 7th season. These were not young players who would have attracted big-name free agents to join them. Derrick Rose, in contrast, was an instant star—Rookie of the Year, an All-Star in his second season, and MVP in his third season—though his subsequent career is a reminder of how fragile even generational talent can be.
Of course, there’s a chance that tanking could succeed spectacularly, netting a future Hall of Famer who could lead the Nets to sustained success for a decade. However, given the distribution of NBA talent, it is much more likely that the outcome will be worse than these projections suggest. Most top-five picks never make an All-Star team, and most of those who do take a few seasons to establish themselves. Hope for the best, but don’t be surprised if the losing doesn’t stop anytime soon. The devil is always in the details ... and in the numbers.
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