2020 NBA Draft: Detroit Pistons got it right, but many teams screwed up

The 2020 NBA Draft was advertised as ‘weak’, with little depth and no real stars. Well, that turned out to be false advertising. It actually was quite deep with talent, and the Detroit Pistons profited.

Selecting players for the NBA Draft has always been an inexact science (see Milic, Darko).

Sometimes it is really easy. ‘I have the No. 1 pick, that LeBron James guy looks decent, let’s take him’, thought Cleveland in 2003.

Other years, not so easy: ‘Boston will get stuck with Jayson Tatum while we outsmart them and move up to take Markelle Fultz’ said morons who ran 76ers in 2018.

The 2020 NBA Draft was one of those where the selections at the top were not as obvious, like 2018.

And NBA scouts and general managers had a bigger handicap than in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic caused havoc with the pre-draft process.

Most of the college basketball season and foreign leagues got a good part of their respective seasons in, so NBA teams did have a chance to look at players.

But there was no NBA Combine, no pre-draft workouts, no post-season all-star games like the Portsmouth Invitational, where previously unknown players could be discovered.

But, these are pros, you figure they can make sense of it all and come up with a pretty good list of who the top players are:

Wrong!

It turned out, a lot of good players, like really good, slipped far down in the draft.

How poor were the evaluations? Look at Zach Lowe of ESPN’s first team All-Rookie ballot:

LaMelo Ball, Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Haliburton, Immanuel Quickly and Desmond Bane.

Lowe is pretty good with the X and O’s and for being a straight shooter when it comes to talent evaluation.

One would (and should) quibble with the Pistons’ Saddiq Bey not being on the first team (he only broke Steph Curry’s rookie three-point record, nothing big) but it does not change the basic point trying to be made.

Of the top five rookies in a respected ESPN’s reporter’s ballot, only 2 were selected in the top 10!

On the Lowe ballot, he has Tyrese Haliburton (No. 12), Immanuel Quickly (No. 25) and Desmond Bane (No. 30) a first team.

Here is Omari Sankofa II of the Free Press’ all-rookie first and second team ballots. A little more Pistons friendly, but the point that the draft was way off is even more emphasized:

Of the 10 players on Sankofa’s ballot, Edwards and Ball are, once again, the only ones drafted in the top 10.

I mean, there were a lot of good players who dropped way down. And these were not unknown players. Having done untold draft profiles last fall, most of these players were in mock drafts in some fashion.

The evaluations were, obviously, just way off.