In his day job, ProfessorB is an award-winning social scientist and Presidential Laureate. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major media outlets. But he also dabbles in NetsWorld.
You can track mock drafts and develop your own opinions, but we have ProfessorB’s!
Net Income’s “Draft Watch” reports have provided periodic updates on which players the various mock drafts have projected for the Nets, and Lucas has provided detailed profiles of some of the most intriguing possibilities. But with lots of talk of potential trades, it isn’t really clear which picks the team will have, much less who they’ll take. Fans have been touting their own favorite prospects for weeks, but what do the experts say?
Here are consensus ratings of the top 32 players in the draft, compiled from eight prominent media sources.
(So, the consensus projects the Brooklyn Nets will take point guards Jeremiah Fears of Oklahoma and Jase Richardson of Michigan State along with 7-footers Danny Wolf of Michigan and Maxime Raynaud of Stanford.)
A word about methodology.
These consensus ratings are a weighted average of rankings from Matt Hoover at Tankathon, Bryan Kalbrosky at USAToday, Jonathan Givony and Jeremy Woo at ESPN, Jonathan Wasserman at Bleacher Report, Sam Vecenie at The Athletic, Kevin O’Connor at Yahoo! Sports, Ricky O’Donnell at SBNation, and Aran Smith at NBADraft.net.
None of the rankings are in complete agreement. Some of the differences reflect differences in timing (though all are recent) or in intention (whether they attempt to take account of specific team needs). Some reflect simple differences in judgment in what is, after all, a very inexact science. The rankings from Tankathon and USAToday get the largest weights in the weighted average—not because they are necessarily most accurate, but because they are most strongly correlated with the overall consensus. The rankings from NBADraft.net and SBNation are the most idiosyncratic, and thus they get smaller weights.
I’ve scaled the weighted average ratings to run from 100 (for consensus top pick Cooper Flagg) to zero (for Creighton big Ryan Kalkbrenner, who is ranked in the twenties in four of the eight mock drafts). While the numbers themselves aren’t very meaningful, the relative distances between players are (except at the very top, where Flagg and Dylan Harper are unanimous choices at #1 and #2).
If the Nets stay put at #8 and #19, they could benefit from the distribution of talent implied by these ratings. There is a noticeable drop-off in perceived quality between Duke big Khaman Maluach and Oklahoma guard Jeremiah Fears (#7 and #8) and Maryland big Derik Queen at #9. At least one of those top eight players will be on the board if the Nets are on the clock at #8. There are even bigger drop-offs near the end of the lottery (between Collin Murray-Boyles at #13 and Cedric Coward at #14) and after Nique Clifford at #20; the Nets will have at least a couple of those #14-20 guys to choose from if they are picking at #19.
Of course, Sean Marks has his own big board, and it may depart substantially from the media consensus. Don’t be surprised if he reaches down the list for a guy he likes. But the further he reaches, the more pressure he’ll face from fans counting on this Draft Night to reset the fortunes of a team whose future is not yet now.