That Time David Stern Rigged the Lottery, and How We Should Expect Lottery Picks to Perform as Rookies
Every few years a NBA prospect comes along that is better than the rest. Most recently, we saw this in the 2014 NBA draft with Andrew Wiggins, and before him Anthony Davis in 2012. Obviously if you are talented enough to be the number one overall pick in any NBA draft then you are amazing at basketball (except maybe you, Anthony Bennett), but some prospects seem to simply have no ceiling on how high their career could potentially flourish.
Back in 1985, it was Patrick Ewing who was the “can’t-miss” prospect. This wasn’t necessarily a case of weak drafts in previous years – I’d say Hakeem Olajuwon, Ralph Sampson and James Worthy turned out just fine – but more a case of Ewing having insane expectations coming out of Georgetown, and for good reason.
At Georgetown Ewing was borderline unstoppable. With a career average of 15.3 points (only 9.7 attempts per game at 62 percent), 9.2 rebounds, 3.4 blocks per game, Ewing led the Hoyas to three (!!!) straight NCAA championship games.
As a sophomore Ewing faced off against a North Carolina Tar Heels team that had both Michael Jordan and James Worthy. What most people remember is Jordan hitting the game-winning mid-range jumper with just 15 seconds. That was great and all, but what in the hell was Georgetown point guard Freddy Brown doing on this pass following Jordan’s make? You would like to see a game end with a shot attempt at least, not those shenanigans.
Ewing rebounded the following season and led Georgetown to a NCAA championship over the University of Houston, but this is by far the least talked about NCAA championship appearance of Ewing’s career thanks to one of the biggest NCAA championship underdogs ever.
With number-one ranked Georgetown taking on unranked Villanova in the NCAA championship during Ewing’s senior campaign, no one game the Wildcats much of a chance. So what do you do when you are a heavy underdog playing one of the most dominant players and programs in the country? Shoot nearly 79 percent from the field of course! Going 22 for 28, Villanova upset the Hoyas in a game known for being one of the greatest upsets in college basketball history.
And this leads us to the 1985 NBA draft. With Ewing having developed (amazing what can happen when players spend more than one year in college) into a force to be reckoned with on both ends of the floor, he was the sure-fire number one overall selection for whoever won the NBA lottery.
This is when things got dicey. And by dicey, I mean frozen. The Frozen Envelope. Is it possible that NBA commissioner David Stern rigged the 1985 draft to ensure one of the biggest NBA markets (New York) got one of the league’s perceived can’t-miss players? Whether you want to believe that Stern managed to either slide a frozen envelope into the drum, or he managed to fold the corner of the correct envelope, there’s no denying that lottery picks (especially the number-one pick) mean a little extra something special.
But is this warranted? Ewing finished his NBA career as a NBA Hall of Famer, but by never bringing a championship to Madison Square Garden, is still somewhat viewed as a disappointment. Do lottery picks more often than not exhibit their skills that made them lottery picks as rookies? Or does the weight of a city’s expectations and the player’s youth typically not jumpstart NBA lottery pick’s careers?
The Study
I took every lottery pick from 2010-2015 and charted their rookie season statistics. The goal here is to see if there is any truth to the notion that the best and most productive NBA rookies are chosen at the top of the first round. All data is from the always fantastic basketball-reference.com. Blake Griffin made the cut as a rookie starting in 2010-2011 season, but because he was a lottery pick in the 2009-2010 season, he will not be in this particular study. Also Joel Embiid (who has turned out to be a great player in my NBA 2K simulations for what it’s worth) and Dario Šarić (Croatian power forward that the 76ers drafted but has not yet left Europe) are the other two lottery picks to not be represented in this study due to them not playing in the NBA at the time of this writing.
Lottery Picks
The solid black bar represents the league average fantasy point total of 22, and the dotted blue line represents a linear trend from the first pick to the 14th pick. Each pick number’s blue bar simply represents how many fantasy points the players picked at that spot have averaged as rookies.
What we see is actually a fairly negative correlation! With a correlation of -0.67, we know that yes, as lottery picks get lower, they average less fantasy points as rookies. A correlation of -1 would be perfectly negatively correlated (so as draft picks go down, fantasy points go down in the same linear fashion), while a correlation of 0 would represent no relationship between the two data sets.
We see first-overall picks (even with the disaster that was/is Anthony Bennett) killing it with an average of 27 fantasy points a game. I wouldn’t worry too much about the specific pick numbers and how the player is doing (I would never recommend playing the sixth-overall pick over the fifth based purely on their draft spot, for instance), but this is still very helpful. We already know by this point that effective NBA rookies aren’t exactly growing from a tree, so knowing that we have a better chance at hitting one of them by taking a higher-drafted rookie bodes well for our DFS championship ambitions.
But what about positions?
I took every lottery pick and sorted them simply by who scored at a first-overall pick rate. There have been nine lottery picks from 2010-2015 to average more than 27 fantasy points a game as rookie. Out of these 10 we have six guards (Wall, Carter-Williams, Lillard, Irving, Wiggins, Oladipo) and three big men (Cousins, Davis, Noel).
Other than Carter-Williams going at #11, the lowest draft pick in this group is Damian Lillard and Nerlens Noel at sixth overall. While it’s not a perfect system, by using our graph from before and this knowledge, we should feel comfortable estimating that the majority of top performing fantasy rookies should come in the first six picks of the draft (based on a little thing called history).
Actionable DFS Info
If you’re ready to go for a rookie, make sure they have either been producing well in the NBA or at least have the potential of a top lottery pick.
Just being a lottery pick has shown not to be enough, and even being a top-10 lottery pick isn’t enough. The best performing rookies have been drafted higher than the worst performing rookies, and it is strongly correlated as well.
Out of the top performing lottery picks, guards have been the most productive.
With only nine total lottery picks in five years surpassing 27 fantasy points per game, six of these picks have been guards. Out of these six, five were drafted in the top six of the draft. You see where this trend is going? Good, now go make some money.