Counting the Baskets

Stacking Up the Celtics Picks

I went through a brief exercise to annotate the stats for the players picked by the Boston Celtics in this years draft using the same basic stats visualization I debuted prior to the draft. The added annotations bring those prospects into focus, and makes it easier to follow them across the different categories.

The main upshot is that Jaylen Brown's numbers at Cal were bad. We that already, but the categories bring it home, most notably on the distribution measure. None of this means Brown is doomed as a prospect, certainly, and as a Celtic fan I will be rooting for him and not for my models to be correct. But it indicates that him finding stardom would buck the historical trends, and reasons for optimism have to come from some where other than his performance at Cal

Other prospects:

• Guershon Yabusele, overall my projections like him much more than the consensus did, ranking the selection as less of a reach than the common reaction. Yabusele was rated close to average in nearly every category compared to other power forward prospects but is given a boost due to age and a higher competition level he faced against grown men in France.
• Ante Zicic was picked near his consensus status before the draft and close to where my model rated him. Unlike Yabusele, Zicic has a good deal more variance in his ratings, coming up higher in scoring and rebounding and lower in distributing the basketball.
• Demetrius Jackson fell quite a bit from his pre-draft ranking and was rated fairly well by my model. Again Jackson isn't a standout in any one area but displayed a solid overall game.
• Benjamin Bentil's one standout skill was scoring, but he below average witch everything else.

The scores are all standardized to average being zero with each category weighted to reflect the values in the model.

Official-ish Draft Board

With the NBA draft one week away, I wanted to get on the record with my semi-official big board draft list[1. I can't write I told you so if I don't tell you anything before hand.] Previously I gave my take on the near top of the draft after the big two of Ben Simmons and Brandon Ingram, but here I want to present the whole list.

The results are sorted by an ensemble of two models including my scouting informed PAWS model and a version using a mixed effects regression model that allows the performance and age variables to vary based on the tier they were drafted with three even tiers. Draft model is then applied using a Monte Carlo model to project the odds of the player being selected in each tier based on the the Draft Express mock draft. (I hope to do a later post with a bit more detail on the Tiered PAWS model).

The biggest surprise of the first round is Diamond Stone, projected on the bubble of the first and second round projected as the the third best prospect by the combined models, though the differences between Stone, Dragan Bender, Jakob Poeltl, and Denzel Valentine are virtually meaningless in terms of expected success.

This group goes a bit beyond the top sixty in order to include some players on the bubble of being drafted. The big mover, in the opposite direction compared to scouting expectations is Jaylen Brown. Brown does particularly poorly in the tiered model, which gives greater weight to the statistical performance on top tier prospects, an effect that usually increases their score, but Brown's poor statistics in college are too bad to lift his projection.

 

Draft Stats by Position

Draft stat visualization by position

In this visualization you can tab through the categories, filter by ranking from Draft Express, and scroll over to find or highlight names. Statistical visual highlights include how much Buddy Hield stands out as a scorer, Denzel Valentine as a distributor, Kris Dunn stands out in blocks and steals, Dragan Bender and Brandon Ingram in youth and Ben Simmons in the overall draft model rating.