The Greatest Draft of All Time

A method to rank the best draft classes in NBA history.

There have been many articles written about the best draft classes in NBA history (almost all of which come to the same conclusion), but most of them have been qualitative in nature. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to approach this from a quantitative angle to see how things would shake out. My basic framework was:

1. Find a career value for each player from a given draft class.

2. Combine these career values to get a score for the entire draft.

Before I could compute a player’s career value, I needed a way to measure a player’s approximate value in a given season. I decided to use individualized wins, a replacement for another statistic I created, win shares*. I wanted to factor in the playoffs, so for a given season a player’s approximate value is defined to be the sum of his regular season and postseason individualized wins.

* Win shares, in my opinion, overrates low-usage/high-efficiency players and underrates high-usage/low-efficiency players.

In order to obtain a player’s career value, I used a weighting scheme similar to what Doug Drinen, creator of Pro-Football-Reference.com, uses for his Approximate Value metric (or AV, for short). Here’s Drinen’s description of the method:

My opinion is that most people mentally rank players by counting all the player’s seasons, but weighting their best seasons more. In order to mimic that, I’ve defined each player’s career “value” to be:

100% of his best season, plus 95% of his 2nd-best season, plus 90% of his 3rd-best season, …

So, for two players with the same career AV, the one with the higher peak will be rated a little higher. And junk seasons at the end of a player’s career count for almost nothing.

I computed the career value for every drafted player in NBA history. To turn this into a draft score, I used weights of 1.0 for the player with the highest career value in a given draft class, 0.95 for the player with the second-highest career value, 0.90 for the player with the third-highest career value, etc., and found the sum of these weighted values. My thinking was this would reward drafts with both high-end talent as well as depth.

Without further ado, here are the top five draft classes in NBA history using this method, with the score for each draft listed in parentheses.

#5: 1987 NBA Draft (788)

The top five players by career value:

1. David Robinson (168)

2. Reggie Miller (130)

3. Scottie Pippen (118)

4. Kevin Johnson (93)

5. Horace Grant (91)

Robinson, the top overall pick, had to delay his NBA career for two years in order to fulfill his commitment to the U.S. Navy. In his rookie season, the San Antonio Spurs saw a 35-win improvement (from 21-61 to 56-26), with Robinson winning the Rookie of the Year Award by a unanimous vote.

This draft featured five players with a career value of at least 90, one more than any other class in history. The 1984, 1996, and 2003 draft classes each had four such players.