if you had the job of choosing the number one overall pick in this year's NBA Draft who would you pick and just as important do you think you can make the correct choice Anthony Edwards OB topand lamellar ball James Weisman are you choosing a player that fills a role on your team or are you choosing strictly based on the best player in the draft regardless of position in some years the decision is pretty clear-cut but in other years you could be one pick away from making a terrible decision that ripples through your franchise for years
to come basketball is a team sports it takes an entire cohesive unit to win a championship but picking the best player in any given draft class can propel a team in the right direction for the next decade so who do you choose well this decision is not nearly as easy as you may think every once in a while a franchisee will use their number one overall pick on a player that makes you scratch your head out of all the non NBA prospects in the world you chose him I mean there's got to be a reason
why dozens of Scouts coaches GM's and millions of dollars worth of resources concluded that these players were worthy of a number one overall pick and like myself you're probably thinking hey I guarantee I could make a better pick than this franchise I mean hindsight is always 20/20 it's easy to sit back and say choosing Darko Miletich over Melo D Wade and Chris Bosh was a terrible decision 17 years after the fact but making the correct choice in the moment is a near monumental task out of the last 40 NBA Draft stating back to 1980 only
12 drafts featured a number one overall pick that was actually the best player in the draft that means even the most savvy NBA minds in the world picked the best player in the draft only 30 percent of the time that's atrocious typically GM's do a decent job as they work their way down the draft board but there's just something about that first pick in a seven-year stretch between 2005 and 2011 every single number one overall pick was not the best player in their draft class and even with more advanced statistics at our disposal more film
available to break down and better scouting techniques making the right pick today is just as unlikely as it was 40 years ago watching an NBA prospect up close and in person is a crucial part of the process but for the sake of this experiment I am going to give you three players and their college stats now all three of these players were in the same draft all of them one and duns the Sixers had the first pick in this draft and they already have a great guard running the points with the limited information provided if
you had to pick who are you choosing with the number one overall pick I'll give you a moment to think about it [Music] [Applause] [Music] so have you made a decision hopefully you've made the correct one because out of these three prospects one of them has had by far the best NBA career so far now it's still very early in their careers but Jason Tatum has asserted himself as the best player in this draft of course making a decision based off of just stats is tough to do but even with the advantage of watching the
kid play GM's and scouts across the league felt that he was only worthy of a third pick in the draft if the Sixers picked Tatum instead of Foltz with the number one overall pick it is very possible that they would have made a trip to the finals by now but making the correct pick is not as easy as it seems so let's give this another shot here are three more prospects this time all three players the same position here are their pre NBA numbers one of them being an international player one of them being a
two-year college guy and the other being a one-and-done the team with the first overall pick needs a stretch for that can space the floor and get the ball inside now make your pick [Music] [Applause] [Music] so which player did you choose well hopefully it was prospect number one because this player is soon to be a two-time League MVP as we've discussed in regards to some picks it is nearly impossible to predict what kind of player that will become so if you didn't pick Yanis in this experiment you're not alone at the time there was very
little evidence that showed that in just six years he would become the MVP of the NBA in 2013 if you took Yanis with a top 10 pick in the draft you would be laughed at and fired from your job and in 2013 if you let Anthony Bennett slip past the 10th pick you would also be laughed at and fired from your job and yet in hindsight both of those decisions would have been the correct one let's do one more this time around we have three guards each with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses and
all with very different games in this situation your team does not need a guard but you know that the best player in the draft is going to be a guard regardless so who do you pick [Music] [Applause] [Music] have you made your choice well in this case it's far too early to tell who will be the best NBA player in years to come it's also tough to assess which prospect is the best one because their circumstances and game are also different experiments like this are impossibly difficult you don't have the advantage of watching a player's
strengths and weaknesses unfold in front of your eyes but it gives us some insight as to what GM's scouts and coaches go through on a yearly basis and just like the league itself the NBA Draft goes through phases like in the early 2000s when the NBA went through its high school prospect craze from the time the NBA was founded in 1949 all the way through the 2000 NBA Draft there were a total of 14 high school players selected in the NBA Draft in the five years following the 2000 NBA Draft there were 28 high school
players selected in the NBA Draft peaking in 2004 and 2005 with 17 high school players selected in just two seasons of course this was following the success of LeBron James and the trend that followed was massive NBA teams were chasing high school players like Robert Swift and Ricky Sanchez in hopes that they would land the next superstar the draft was getting crazy only five times in NBA history has a player with no college experience gone first overall in the draft all five of these picks came within a six-year span but the odds of a team
making the right choice in the NBA draft is slim out of tens of thousands of potential prospects the NBA draft narrows the pool of players down to about 80 80 guys that have a shot at getting drafted out of these 80 players 60 of them will actually get drafted out of the 60 that are drafted eight won't even play a single second in the NBA of the 52 that do see action in the NBA only 39 draftees will play at least one season in the NBA we are down to just 39 players and we have
only covered a season's worth of games of NBA playing time out of these 39 players about 12 will average ten points are more throughout their career and of these twelve players about five of them will eventually make at least one all-star team but here's the kicker on average only one in two Draft classes features a league MVP in fact in the last 25 years there have been just as many busts chosen with the number one overall pick as League MVPs so you have the honors of selecting the first overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft
as optimistic as you want to be odds are you won't select the best player in the draft the player you do select has about a 75% chance of becoming an all-star and about a 1 in 5 chance of becoming a league MVP but he also has the same odds of becoming a bust you are in need of a lengthy point guards to bring a spark to your franchise but then again you have a shot at an NBA ready 7-foot one-inch big man who looks to be the best player in the draft regardless of position your
fanbase is begging you to go with the general consensus and choose the player who is projected to go first overall but the two-year college guy that has proven time after time that he can perform with consistency and efficiency is starting to look like the most reasonable pick five minutes on the clock and your team is on the board make your pick you
