NBA Draft: Let's Discuss Mock Drafts Vs. Big Boards
With the NBA regular season entering its final months, focus will soon shift towards the draft lottery, and later the draft itself.
During that process, two things will run rampant on the interwebz for all to see: Big Boards & Mock Drafts.
So, in the spirit of full transparency, let's break down what those are, what they do, and why they can be quality tools for people who may not be intimately familiar with draft prospects.
Let's start with the one that sounds the most obvious, but actually isn't. The Mock Draft.
As the name suggests, a writer will attempt to forecast how the draft shakes out, trying to go 60-for-60 on their draft night bingo card.
(Nobody ever does.)
A Mock Draft isn't a tiered system of how players rank in their class. Talent level, influence, and overall player analysis has little place here. It's exclusively about pairing up Team A with Player A in an effort for both of them to come out ahead.
Of course, usually the best player does go first overall, but the further down the Mock Draft you go, the more it morphs from obvious talent recognition to "I kinda like that guy in this specific situation, so they should totally get together on prom, I mean draft night".
In a nutshell, it's guesswork. Educated guesswork for people in the know, but guesswork nevertheless.
So how can guesswork be informative you might wonder?
Simple. If you're Googling "NBA Mock Drafts", odds are good you aren't sticking at reading just one. And that leads to patterns. If you find the same group of players slotted to roughly the same teams, or going in a specific area, you gain a sort of understanding of how a player is generally perceived, and what type of team he'd likely be good on.
Remember, it's an imperfect science, so volume here is key. If a guy is projected to go third overall one place, but outside the lottery on nine other websites, odds are good you should lean towards the latter.
(And before you come at me, Rockets fans, I'll have you know I had Alperen Şengün sixth on my Big Board before the draft, and him going 16th was a damn travesty. Friends?)
This leads me to the Big Board, and oh my goodness can that be a bloodbath.
I have literally seen a friendship ruined because two people disagreed on whether Brandon Ingram should be first or second on their Big Board. This is a high-stakes game with opinions and feelings flying so high, it makes an election-year discourse look like child's play.
The Big Board is, fortunately, very simple. Team context is totally ignored, and here the players take center stage. It's all about who's better than the other, or who will have the better career. And those two aren't always the same, which means there are LAYERS to this.
Rarely will you find Big Boards where just the Top 10 is broadly agreed upon. Sure, you might have multiple writers having the same ten players in there, but in the same order? That's solar eclipse type of rarity.
Big Boards are thus a major source of frustration and uncertainty for the uninitiated observer looking to improve their draft knowledge.
(Fortunately, when they do flip to ESPN on draft night, they immediately recognize they're already in good shape, and miles ahead of Kendrick Perkins, who has no clue why he's even there.)
So what does Big Boards offer, generally speaking?
For one, most Big Boards come with a certain level of commentary, or justification, for why a player is slotted where he is. That means data. Subjective data, yes, but you get something out of it. If five writers all outline that Player X has an uncanny ability to connect on spot-up jumpers, you begin to form a basic understanding of that player.
My advice to readers? Use Big Boards to understand the players better. Don't get caught up in whether one player is half an inch better than another player. It doesn't really matter, particularly as they've yet to be drafted, and landing with the right team can catapult a player up to higher levels.
All in all, volume of information is key here. Volume is the best way to identify patterns, and it provides the reader with a rough baseline of how to evaluate players.
So there you have it, people. Now go out into the internet wilderness and read as much as you can! I'm sure it'll be extra fun this year, when not even NBA teams have a clue as to how this upcoming class should be ranked.
Unless noted otherwise, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball-Reference. All salary information via Spotrac. All odds courtesy of FanDuel Sportsbook.
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