In
the last Draft
Dreams, I measured the success of recent top 5 NBA draft picks by the
ultimate yardstick – winning a championship.
This time around, I’ll look at the whole gamut of playoff outcomes.
To
recap, I looked at the top 5 picks chosen in the 10 NBA drafts between 2000 and
2009 and examined how those players’ teams fared.[1] Team performance was measured by how far a
given player’s team went in their most successful playoff run with that player;
a player had to average at least 15 minutes per game during that season or
playoff series in order to get credit for their team’s progress.[2]
1 in 4 of the players studied (26.5%) were total busts in terms of their team
impact. They never were a significant
contributor on a playoff team; I call these guys zero-impact players. This
includes obvious draft busts such as Darko Milicic and Adam Morrison, in
addition to some guys you don't immediately think of, like Marcus Fizer, Mike
Dunleavy Jr. and Jay Williams (sorry Jay, bad luck and/or stupidity don't get
you off this list). This category also
includes Kevin Love, who is obviously a great player, but hasn’t had much help
thus far.
3
out of 4 (73.5%) of these top 5 picks made the playoffs at least once. Just over half (51%) won at least 1 playoff
series. 1 in 3 (32.7%) made it to the
conference finals. As reported in Draft
Dreams Part 1, about 1 in 5 (18.4%) players reached the NBA Finals, and roughly
1 in 16 (3 of the 49 players) won an NBA championship.
This short
article is only meant to provide a broad overview of the playoff progress of
the 49 players in the study, the next couple of posts in this series will break down playoff impact by position.
Sources:
Basketball-reference.com, Wikipedia (info retrieved
4/15/2012-4/21/2012)
[1] Ricky Rubio was
a top 5 pick in the 2009 draft, but he was omitted from the analysis because he
played overseas for 2 years after being drafted, so he is effectively a rookie
this season (2011-2012).
[2] For example, Mike Miller played
in the 2011 NBA Finals with the Heat, but only averaged 11.9 minutes per game,
so he does not receive credit for that playoff run. Kwame Brown played for the Wizards during the
2004-2005 season during which the Wizards did go to the playoffs, but he only
appeared in 42 regular season games and only played in 3 of the team’s 10
playoff games, so he doesn’t get credit for making the playoffs.
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