Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are putting
aside the box scores, the buzzer beaters, and
really looking at the machinery behind the curtain.
We're talking about an event that is, I would
argue, more stressful, definitely more strategic,
and way more mathematical than a Game 7. It's
the one night of the year where hope is, like,
actually quantified. Exactly. We're talking about
the NBA draft. And look, if you're a casual fan,
you might think, OK, it's just a list of names
being read out. But we've got a stack of research
here that suggests this is this is the single
most high stakes decision making event in modern
sports. It's high stakes corporate H .R., but,
you know, televised globally. And the fascinating
thing about the draft is that it isn't just about
basketball talent anymore. It's this massive
collision of. complex eligibility rules, probability
math, global logistics, and extremely high level
asset management. And that's the mission for
today. We want to unpack the mechanics, the history,
and all those hidden strategies behind the draft.
We're going to look at how it evolved from what
was literally an endless selection process to
the tight two -round show we see today. We'll
also get into the lottery system, which involves
way more security and math than most people realize,
and that massive shift towards globalization.
Oh, yeah. And we have to talk about the trades,
because draft picks aren't just for picking players.
They're currency. But let's start with the basics,
just to set the scene. Late June, 30 teams. What's
the actual vibe in those war rooms? The vibe
is controlled chaos. Since 1989, the format has
been strictly two rounds. That's 60 players selected
total. Every team has, in theory, one pick per
round. In theory is doing a lot of heavy lifting
there. Huge lifting because trades just mess
that order up completely. But the constraint
is the key here. You know, if you look at baseball
or football, their drafts go on for days, seven
rounds, sometimes more. The NBA is tight. You
have 60 slots to secure the future of your franchise.
And if you get it wrong. You can set your team
back half a decade. And if you get it right,
you change history. But here's something I found
that was interesting in the research. If you
aren't picked in those two rounds, it might actually
be better for you. In some ways, yes, it sounds
counterintuitive, but think about it. If you're
drafted 60th overall, you are locked into that
team. You have no say in the matter. But if you
go undrafted, you become an undrafted free agent.
Suddenly, you have all the agency. You can shop
yourself around. Exactly. You can negotiate with
any team, choose the best fit for your style
of play, or pick a roster that actually needs
your specific position. Being the 60th pick locks
you into a situation that might not work. Being
undrafted opens up the whole league. We see guys
like Fred Van Vliet or Austin Reeves who won
undrafted and ended up with massive careers because
they found them. the right spot that's a great
nuance it's better to be wanted by everyone than
stuck with someone who might not even play you
but the draft wasn't always this efficient was
it when i was looking into the history here the
early drafts sounded well Frankly, exhausting.
Exhausting is the right word. I mean, if we go
back to the early days, say 1960 or 1968, the
draft went for 21 rounds. 21 rounds. Who are
they even picking in round 21? The equipment
manager. They were just scraping the bottom of
the barrel. Teams would just keep selecting players
until they literally ran out of prospects. It
was a war of attrition. By 1974, they stabilized
it to 10 rounds and then seven in 1985. But that
shift to two rounds in 89 was really significant.
Why cut it so short? Was it just to save time?
It was actually an agreement with the Players
Association. They wanted to stop teams from,
you know, holding a player's rights hostage.
If you draft a guy in the 10th round, you own
his NBA rights, but you probably aren't going
to sign him to the main roster. So he's just
stuck in limbo. He can't sign with anyone else.
Right, right. Shortening the draft just freed
those players up. Exactly. That makes a ton of
sense. Now, speaking of weird historical rules,
I found this territorial pick rule fascinating.
This feels like something from a completely different
universe. Oh, it absolutely is. This was in effect
from 1956 to 1965. You have to remember, the
NBA wasn't a global juggernaut back then. They
were struggling to sell tickets in local markets.
So the league allowed a team to forfeit its first
round pick to select a player from their immediate
local area, usually within a 50 mile radius.
So purely a marketing play. 100 percent. The
logic was. If you draft the local college star,
the local fans will buy tickets to see him play
pro. It bypassed the draft order completely.
So if the best player in the country just happened
to go to college in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia
Warriors just got him. That's it. That's how
they got Wilt Chamberlain. He was a territorial
pick. Wow. Imagine if that existed today. It
would completely break the competitive balance.
It would be like the Lakers getting first dibs
on every UCLA start just because of geography.
It sounds completely insane by modern standards.
It was. They got rid of it in 1966 and introduced
the coin flip for the top pick, which is that's
generally considered the start of the modern
draft era where competitive balance finally took
priority. Okay, let's fast forward a bit to who
was actually getting picks. Because for a long
time, this was a college man's game. You did
your four years, got your degree, then got drafted.
Correct. That was the standard path. But then
we hit the mid -90s. And the high school era
begins from about 95 to 2005. You saw this explosion
of superstars coming straight from their high
school prom to the NBA. Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant,
LeBron James, Dwight Howard. And these weren't
just roster fillers. These were league defining
talent. They were. But for every Kobe, there
were three or four guys who jumped too early
and. you know, washed out. The league got worried
about the optics, the maturity levels. It's expensive
to draft a kid who isn't ready for the lifestyle
or the physicality. So in 2006, the door just
slammed shut. The league changed the eligibility
rules, creating what we now know as the one and
done phenomenon. Can you break down the actual
rule there? Because I feel like one and done
gets thrown around a lot. But what does the regulation
actually say? Sure. The rule states a player
must be at least 19 years old and one year removed
from their high school graduation class. It doesn't
explicitly say you must go to college. Right.
So you could go play in Europe or join the G
League Ignite or I guess just sit on your couch
for a year. Technically, yes, though most chose
college because of the exposure. But it created
this dynamic of. Early entrance underclassmen
declaring for the draft and giving up their remaining
college eligibility. It turned college basketball
into a pit stop. Although the rules have softened
a bit there recently, haven't they? It used to
be a one -way street. Once you declared, that
was it. It did change. Since 2016, players can
declare, go to the combine, get that feedback
from scouts, and if they don't like what they
hear, say they're projected for the second round
instead of the lottery, they can withdraw and
go back to school. Which seems so much healthier
for the players. It's like getting a job offer
before quitting your current job. Absolutely.
It removes the guesswork and saves kids from
making a catastrophic career error based on some
bad advice. Okay, I want to pivot to the part
of the draft that drives fans the most crazy.
but it's also the most unique thing about the
NBA, the lottery. The ping pong balls. Yes. Why
do we do this? In the NFL, if you're the worst
team, you pick first. Simple. Why does the NBA
have to make it a game show? One word, tanking.
Losing on purpose. Exactly. In the NBA, one single
player can change a franchise more than in any
other sport. You know, in football you have 53
guys. In basketball you have five on the court.
One superstar is worth everything. So before
1985, teams were accused of intentionally losing
games to get into that coin flip for the top
pick. The NBA introduced the lottery to inject
randomness and discourage that behavior. Walk
us through the mechanics because I think people
visualize a guy just pulling a team logo out
of a hat. But there's some serious math happening
in the back room somewhere. Oh, it's incredibly
secure. It happens in a separate room, usually
with representatives from Ernst & Young or a
similar firm. No cell phones allowed. They confiscate
them at the door until the broadcast reveal is
over. It's treated like a state secret. Mechanically,
they use a standard lottery machine with 14 ping
pong balls numbered 1 through 14. They mix them
up and draw four balls. The order they come out
doesn't matter. OK, so like 1, 4, 9, 12. Right.
And mathematically, there are exactly one. So
if you're the worst team, you just get more of
those combinations assigned to you. Precisely.
If your combination gets pulled, you get the
pick. But, and here is where it gets really interesting,
they changed the odds significantly in 2019.
This was the flattening of the odds. Why the
change? Was the old system broken? The league
felt it was rewarding failure too much. Before
2019, the absolute worst team had 250 combinations.
That's a 25 % chance at the number one pick.
Pretty good odds if you're trying to rebuild.
Too good. It encouraged that race to the bottom.
You had teams actively stripping their rosters
to be the worst. It made the regular season unwatchable
for those teams. So post -2019, the NBA flattened
the curve. Now, the three worst teams all have
an equal number of combinations, 140 each. That's
a 14 % chance. So being the absolute worst team
doesn't give you a mathematical advantage over
the second or third worst team anymore. Exactly.
It leveled the playing field at the bottom. You
can still be bad, but being historically bad
no longer guarantees you the best asset. That
is such a crucial distinction. It turns the lottery
into a risk management problem for GMs. Yeah.
You can tank, but the payout isn't guaranteed.
You could lose 70 games and still pick fifth.
Right. And that uncertainty is exactly what the
league wanted. I want to shift gears to what
I think is the most visible change in the last
two decades. Globalization. Because when you
watch old drafts, it was just so American. Very.
And when international players were picked early
on, they were usually guys who had come to the
U .S. for college anyway. Think about Hakeem
Olajuwon. He's Nigerian, but he played at the
University of Houston. Right. Or Michael Thompson
from the Bahamas. He played at Minnesota. Exactly.
The scouts were still just going to NCAA games.
They weren't flying to Lagos or Nassau. The pipeline
was still the American college system. If you
weren't in that system, you were invisible. So
when was the watershed moment? When did the dam
break for international players who didn't go
to U .S. colleges? 2002. Yao Ming. The Great
Wall. He was the first international player without
any U .S. college experience to be selected number
one overall. And the impact was seismic. Culturally,
it was huge. There's a quote from Time magazine
back then that said, Yao transformed his countrymen
into mighty men who can jam with the very best.
And practically, the ratings in China must have
just gone through the roof. Skyrocketed. And
looking at the data, the 2002 draft had 17 international
players selected. It really opened the floodgates.
It forced NBA front on. to expand their scouting
departments globally. You couldn't just have
a guy covering the ACC in the Big Ten anymore.
You needed a guy in Spain, a guy in the Balkans,
a guy in Asia. And if we look at the modern era,
it's almost becoming the norm to have an international
number one. It is. You had Andrea Bernani from
Italy in 2006. Then later you get Ben Simmons
from Australia in 2016, DeAndre Ayton from the
Bahamas in 2018. Recently, it's been the French
Revolution. Truly. Victor M. Manyama going number
one in 2023 was huge. I mean, he's a generational
talent. maybe the best prospect since LeBron.
But then in 2024, you have Zachary Resicher,
another French player going number one. So that
trend is accelerating. It is. We've gone from
can their game translate to the NBA to realizing
that the international development systems, these
professional academies in Europe, are producing
some of the most polished prospects in the world.
They're playing Pro Bowl at 16, whereas American
kids are playing AAU circuits. That's a fascinating
divergence in training philosophy. One is learning
to win games against men. The other is showcasing
skills for Instagram highlights. And GMs are
noticing who is more ready to play on day one.
Now, we can't talk about the draft without talking
about the currency of the draft. Because half
the time, the excitement isn't about who gets
picked. It's about the trades. This is the asset
management side of things. A draft pick is a
tradable asset for up to seven years into the
future. It's like a futures contract in finance.
You're trading pure potential. But not all picks
are created equal. Right. You hear these terms
thrown around protected versus unprotected. For
the listener who might hear this on the news,
what's the practical difference? Unprotected
is the gold standard. It is the most dangerous
asset to trade away. If I trade you my 2028 first
round pick unprotected, that means you get that
pick no matter what. If my team completely collapses,
if all my stars get injured and that pick becomes
the number one overall pick, it's yours. Ouch.
That is high risk. You could be handing a championship
contender the next superstar. It's extremely
valuable for the receiver and terrifying for
the giver. That's why you see protected picks
so often. That's where a team says, I'll trade
you this pick, but if it lands in the top five,
I keep it and I'll give you something else later.
It's a safety net. It is. It protects against
the doomsday scenario. And then there's the pick
swap. Which just feels like a total power move.
It is. A pick swap gives a team the right to
trade places in the draft order if the other
team's pick ends up being better. You aren't
getting an extra pick. You're just upgrading
yours at their expense. It's pure leverage. Now,
is there anything? It was so bad that the NBA
created a rule stating that a team cannot be
without a first round pick in consecutive future
drafts. You can't trade your 2026 and your 2027
first rounders. You have to keep one. So it's
a mechanism to save teams from their own bad
management. That's all it is. It's a guardrail
against desperation. The league needs stable
franchises. They can't afford teams becoming
barren wastelands for a decade because one owner
got impatient. I love that. Okay, before we wrap
up, we have to talk about the actual output of
this whole machine, the players. When we look
back at history, are there draft classes that
stand out as the gold standard? Oh, absolutely.
There is a holy trinity of draft classes. 1984
is legendary Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Jordan,
Charles Barkley, John Stockton. I mean, that's
the Mount Rushmore of the 90s right there in
one single night. Hard to beat Jordan and Hakeem
in the same year. Then you have 1996, Kobe Bryant,
Allen Iverson, Steve Nash, Ray Allen, and then
2003, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh.
Carmelo Anthony. Those years basically defined
the league for the decades that followed. If
you had a pick in those years, it was hard to
miss. They did. And on the flip side, you have
the cautionary tales. Like the year 2000. Dark
year. Sports Illustrated called the first round
of the 2000 draft a horrible group of players.
It's widely regarded as the worst class in history.
Kenyon Martin went number one, and while he had
a decent career, the depth just... It wasn't
there. You look at that list and it's a lot of
role players and busts. It just goes to show
the variance. Sometimes the talent just isn't
there. And speaking of variance. Yeah. Sometimes
you just get weird anomalies. I have to bring
up the Manute Bowl story because it's just bizarre.
It is one of my favorites. So Manute Bowl, who
we know as one of the tallest players ever at
7 '7", was actually drafted in 1983. in the fifth
round but the nba deemed him ineligible there
were issues with his passport and his age nobody
was quite sure how old he was or if the paperwork
was valid so the pick was voided he had to go
play college ball at a division two school which
is already a funny visual then two years later
in 1985 he gets drafted again this time in the
second round so he's the rare guy who was drafted
twice drafted twice and despite his size He holds
the record for being the tallest player to hit
a three -pointer. He was a unicorn before we
use the term unicorn. That is fantastic. It really
highlights how much of this is an inexact science.
You have all this data, all these scouts, the
Ernst & Young accountants, and you still end
up drafting a guy twice because of passport issues.
It keeps it interesting. So let's zoom out. We've
got the lottery math, the global takeover, the
trading strategy, the history. What does this
all mean for someone watching the draft this
June? It means you're watching a massive optimization
problem playing out in real time. You have 30
teams trying to balance immediate needs with
long term potential, navigating a global talent
tool, all while constrained by a salary cap and
strict rules. It's messy, but it's where teams
are built. And as we've seen with the lottery
changes in the international surge. The only
constant is that the process keeps evolving.
Exactly. The game changes and the mechanism for
finding players changes with it. So here's a
thought to leave you with. We mentioned the surge
of international number one picks, France, back
to back in 23 and 24. If the best players in
the world are increasingly coming from professional
academies in Europe rather than the NCAA, are
we approaching a future where the U .S. college
system is no longer the primary pipeline for
NBA talent? It's a very real possibility. I mean,
if you're a top prospect, why play for free or
for an aisle of money in college when you can
get professional coaching and development in
Madrid or Paris? The gap is closing fast. Something
to think about as you watch the names get called
this year. Thanks for diving in with us. We'll
catch you on the next one.