I love and hate the final month before the draft. It’s like watching the big third act of a movie, here comes the suspense, but the screen is blocked by a curtain and its in a different language, so you have to kind of use your best judgement on what the characters are saying.
We can mostly find out what prospects are working out where, but we can’t see the workouts or hear the conversations happening behind front office’s closed doors.
Workouts are considered useful for assessing competitiveness, focus, professionalism and conditioning. The off-court interviews, the dinners, the personality eval, they’re more important. In the gym, the executives are there up close to see how a player approaches an on-court interview before the off-court one. How much should the performance part of a 1-on-none workout actually matter after watching them 30+ games or in some case 4+ years? Probably not much unless you notice something new or the results show up on one side of the spectrum, like a 7-footer who didn’t shoot during the year but suddenly looks money from three, or a player who’s huffing and puffing, leaning over and looks unprepared physically.
Some evaluators may decide to dock players who get tired quickly, some might see an admirable and telling level of drive when a player is treating a drill like it’s the 4th quarter of a playoff game, and he’s screaming with intensity after a make or dunk.
Also, don’t put much stock into whether a player works out with Team X or not. I hear plenty of stories about a team taking a guy who they didn’t bring in. Banchero never visited Orlando and didn’t know until draft day he was going #1. Now everyone has to give access to their medicals, that’s really the biggest thing teams want to see unless they had previous questions about character and want to grill a guy, learn more about his personality.
Bringing in prospects you know you’re probably not drafting is good for relationship building and intel gathering for future free agent/trade opportunities. It can also throw other teams off, make them overthink, although that’s not really a priority when teams schedule workouts.
New thought: One of the problems with pre-draft reporting is that you’re usually getting info from either “rival teams” or agents. The Sixers aren’t telling me or any reporter who they like at #3, and if they do, it’s either an intentionally false leak or it’s because they have trust you’ll keep it quiet because they have a real relationship with that reporter. The Hornets aren’t going to tell Report X they truly want Prospect G if they think he’s going to report it to fans.
I’ve been told close-to-the-chest opinions by certain execs, but they’re off the record, I’m not reporting them or I’ll blow up my relationship. And I care more about creating and keeping those relationships than having any minimally-interesting scoop that may or might not happen during a night when everything is so fluid and changing.
Random thought: Teams giving out promises is barely a real thing. There’s really not much incentive to give a player a promise unless it’s to prevent them from withdrawing from the draft. What if you promise player G, but player B, who you have ranked five spots higher, is available when you’re on the board? Teams have no loyalty to any prospect before the draft.
Anyway back to reporting the draft—another challenge is that each front office is made up of a dozen-plus evaluators, some with no pull, others who make the final decision. Just because Scout X says he loves Prospect Y and hopes he’s on the board when his team is picking, it doesn’t mean the rest of the front office feels the same way. Media outlets often say, Team F really loves Prospect V, when in reality, one person from within the organization shared that opinion, not an entire front office.
I remember talking to a scout before one draft, he laughed at the idea that Player C could be taken in the lottery, and then his team took Player C in the lottery!
The non GMS/AST GMs are also not included in everything that’s going on. I remember it was rumored that one team offered a star player for the #1 pick one year, and I asked a Director of Scouting of the team with the pick whether it was true, and he said something like, “That never came across my desk, but I did hear that it may have happened.”
Agents are also the best. Just a different breed. Talking with agents and it sounds like there will be 30 lottery picks and 45 first-rounders every year. They know which teams are considering their guys, but they don’t know where they’re going until that phone call hits mid-draft.
Usually agents overhype their guys and think they’re going earlier than they are. It even works there other way too. I remember an agent telling me his guy, who I had in the 30s, really had a chance to go first round. To his surprise he wound up going in the lottery!
Anyway, I always felt my job was to keep the fans informed as early and regularly as possible about who’s going to be in the draft discussion, where they’re projected, who you need to take serious, etc. I take more pride in midseason analysis—telling you in January that Prospect S deserves to be thought of as a potential first-rounder—than getting the final mock draft right. Because by June 24, every pretty much knows the tiers, nobody knows who’s going exactly where after the first few picks or so.
jwscouting.com 