First Round Picks

It didn't used to always be about draft picks. It wasn't too long ago that the majority of NBA teams were treating their first-round picks like an extra dollar at the strip club. The odds are that a guy you took in the end of the first round wouldn't have much of a chance to crack your rotation and any guy who lasted past the lottery probably didn't have that much upside to begin with. 

These days it's all about gathering assets. There are teams out there hoarding first-round picks and treating them like Scrooge McDuck treats gold bricks. 

If this was the NFL, having eight first-round picks in the next three years would mean a pretty good chance of creating a dynasty. An NFL team has 22 starters and 8-10 crucial reserves and a good portion of their players get seriously injured over the course of a season. NFL teams always need more bodies. 

An NBA team has 5 starters and 3-4 guys off the bench who get minutes and that's it. There's only one basketball and only five guys can play at a time. It doesn't really matter how good your 10th, 11th and 12th men are - they aren't going to play. For that matter, it doesn't really matter how good your 6th, 7th and 8th men are - they aren't going to get many more shots. If a first-round pick comes to a situation where there are established players at his position ahead of him, there isn't all that much he can do. He's not going to beat out guys with more experience than him.

The same thing happens to a lesser extent in college. Is Zach LaVine better than Jordan Adams? Maybe. It didn't matter because Adams was a year ahead of him at UCLA and he had already proven himself as a high-level college player. That's the way the world works. A basketball player can only be as valuable as the role available to them on the team they are on. If you don't draft a guy without having a plan for how to use him, he's probably not going to be very good. There are diminishing returns to the number of young players you can have at any one time.

We saw this play out all over the league in the run-up to the trade deadline. 

Goran Dragic demanded a trade in Phoenix because he kept seeing the Suns bringing in players who take the ball out of his hands and diminish his role on the team. Why sign Isaiah Thomas and draft Tyler Ennis in the first round? How many PG's did Phoenix need? If we leave the IT2 question aside, the reason they drafted Ennis is because they needed to draft someone. They had three first-round picks and a bunch of young players already on their roster so they were going to create a logjam no matter what they did. I suspect they took Bogdan Bogdanovic at No. 27 just because he was going to stay in Europe. They had no real need to stick another guy who was never going to play on the end of their bench.

It didn't really matter how good Ennis was because the odds are he was never going to be able to show it in Phoenix. Eric Bledsoe and Isaiah Thomas received contracts worth nearly $100 million this off-season. If you think they were going to take kindly to some rookie coming in and taking away some of their stats, look at what just happened with Goran Dragic. 

A first-round pick is like a car - they lose half their value the second they come off the lot. The same guy whom everyone loved coming into the draft, when the only statistics on him were his sterling NCAA numbers, is now a rookie with a very spotty track record at the NBA level. How much could the Kings have gotten for the No. 8 overall pick in last year's draft at the time? How much could they get for Nik Stauskas now? Once a guy is on the market, everyone else gets suspicious. Why do you want to trade him so fast? More importantly, the team that is trading him loses all of their leverage. I'm not giving you top value if you are trying to trade me a rookie you have fallen out of love with already.

A team with a lot of first-round picks is in a constant rush to turn them into something real - a lottery ticket is going to be more valuable before the lottery than after. Unless it isn't, in which case why would you even consider trying to trade it? 

That's what was going on with the Thunder in last year's draft, when everyone collectively lost their mind about the Josh Huestis thing. Oklahoma City has so many talented young players gathering dust on their bench it's embarrassing. What's the point in adding one more guy that Scott Brooks is never going to play? Why not try to develop Huestis a bit in the D-League and extend out his rookie deal until he's later in his 20's - that's the only way the Thunder are going to be getting any value out of this pick. They couldn't ask a guy who would normally be a first-round pick to take that offer but they could give it to a fringe guy with an interesting skill-set who could see the big picture. With so many young players ahead of him, including another rookie in Mitch McGary, anyone OKC took at No. 29 would have an uphill battle to ever crack the rotation in the near future. 

What the brain trust in OKC has found out is that it doesn't really matter what type of young players you bring in if your coach isn't going to play them. Scott Brooks ain't Greg Popovich - he's got zero time for the big picture. He's trying to win right now which means playing Derek Fisher and Caron Butler as many minutes as their broken down bodies can stand and then more. Whether that actually helps the team win now doesn't really matter because that's what he's going to do. For a young player to grow into a big role, there has to be a big picture perspective about the type of player you bring in to play around him. 

In short, you have to be committed to their success. If you are constantly bringing in young players at the same position every season, some of them are going to look like busts. Not everyone can play at the same time. That's what happened in Sacramento when they took Nik Stauskas the year after they took Ben McLemore. Once that happened, the odds that one of those guys would end up being shopped were astronomical because what coach wants to have two young mistake-prone SG's in his rotation at the same time? Either the coach of the Philadelphia 76ers or a coach who is about to get fired, which is not a knock on the 76ers so much as it as a reality that a coach who plays a lot of young players is going to have a worse win-loss record than a coach who doesn't and that coaches who win more games tend to keep their jobs and get higher salaries.

The ideal scenario for accumulating a bunch of assets is that you will flip them into something else. The problem is that when people make trades, they still look at a player's points per game, rebounds per game and assists per game. There are only so many points, rebounds and assists on a given team at a given time. That's why it's called "a pecking order" - everyone wants their pecks and there aren't enough to go around.

The Suns got the first-round pick they turned into Tyler Ennis in return for Marcin Gortat, a move that was widely praised at the time but seems a little lopsided now. What are the odds that a guy the Wizards took at No. 18 was ever going to see the floor in Washington? Otto Porter can barely get minutes. That isn't to say there weren't a lot of good players taken after the No. 18 pick in last year's draft only that none of them would have gotten much of a chance to show what they could do in Phoenix or Washington.

The good news for the Suns is that it doesn't really matter what they got for Gortat as long as they got him out the door because he was standing in the way of playing time for young C's like Miles Plumlee and Alex Len.

That's how the worm turns in the NBA. Talent is everywhere because as many as 30 first-round picks come into the league each season and there aren't 30 open rotation spots for them to fill. It's kill or be killed in these NBA streets and the vast majority of players know they are one injury or one bad month of play away from losing their jobs and never getting them back. The only guys who aren't keeping track of how many minutes and how many touches they get are old guys who have made a ton of money and just want to win and even then it doesn't happen as often as you would think. Ask Brian Shaw what happens when you try to cut Andre Miller's PT. Was it professional what Miller did to Shaw? I would think not but Dre Miller has been a professional basketball player for 18 years so he would know a lot more about it than me.

Building through the draft is like building a team in general - it's all about how the pieces fit together. The difference is that it's much harder because you are trying to fit together pieces that haven't really even been formed yet. I was a massive nerd as a child so the best analogy I can give for this is how my man J. Michael Straczynski wrote Babylon 5. The reason nerds appreciated Babylon 5 was that it struck to a really strict plot that held together over multiple seasons. This wasn't like Lost where the writers seemed to be making shit up on a week to week basis. You could get into the mythology of Babylon 5 because you knew everything would pay off eventually.

TV for a less cynical age.

How did that work in real life? It got pretty tricky.

"The trouble, of course," wrote Straczynski, "is that unlike writing a novel, where characters exist only on a sheet of paper, actors... can get sick, they can get into contract disputes, they can get hit by meteors... Consequently, in drafting the story for Babylon 5, I made sure... there is a ‘trap door' built into the storyline for every character."

In order to build through the draft, you need to be able to look 2-3 years down the road. The problem is you never really know how a draft pick is going to turn out so you have to plan for things that might not actually happen. The Utah Jazz have to plan for a world where Dante Exum is a really good player but they don't know for sure. They probably planned to be in a world where Trey Burke is a really good player. Things can change pretty fast in the NBA. #FerrisBueller

Crazy to think that Melo is now the only player left from the 54-win team two seasons ago. Life came at NYK fast.
— Chris Herring (@HerringWSJ) February 19, 2015

That's why you really want to get these draft picks right. When the Jazz took Dante Exum, it meant they couldn't really take D'Angelo Russell or Emmanuel Mudiay, even if they wound up in the Top 3. There just wouldn't be enough basketballs to go around for all of those guys. Once they drafted Exum, they were deciding that Burke wasn't going to be that nice and they weren't going to be taking any more combo guards in future drafts. There's an opportunity cost for drafting anyone.

It always comes back to opportunity cost. Drafting Joel Embiid makes Nerlens Noel less valuable. Playing Rudy Gobert makes Enes Kanter less valuable. Trading for Dion Waiters makes Reggie Jackson less valuable. Signing Isaiah Thomas makes Goran Dragic less valuable.

Building a team isn't about drafting the best player available and it's not even really about collecting the most assets. It's about having good players AND putting them in the best position to succeed. Having too many talented young players on your roster is a good problem to have, but it's still a problem.