Is the 2024 NBA Draft Really as Bad as Everyone Says it Is?
Making sense of the skepticism around the upcoming draft class.
📍 CHICAGO — The Trail Blazers entered Sunday with the fourth-best lottery odds. They came out of the night with the No. 7 and 14 overall picks in next month’s draft.
Falling back three spots is never the result any team wants, especially as the “reward” at the end of a season where they lost 61 games. In one of the most chaotic lotteries in recent memory, Atlanta’s three (3) percent odds cashed and they won the No. 1 overall pick. Portland wasn’t the only team that fell. The worst team in the league, Detroit, fell as far back as they could, to fifth. Toronto, who engaged in some egregious late-season tanking, lost their pick to San Antonio when it fell out of the top six. Memphis played 33 different players this season due to injuries and fell back to No. 9 overall for their troubles.
But in the three days that I’ve spent at Wintrust Arena for the predraft combine, I haven’t gotten the sense that any of the teams that fell in the lottery—be it Portland or anyone else—are losing too much sleep over it. The conventional wisdom from team personnel has been some version of, “You’d always rather have a higher pick, but if there was any draft that you’re OK with falling, it’s this one.”
In the coming weeks, as the Blazers start bringing players to Portland for in-person workouts and trade talks take shape around the league, we’ll get into more specifics about what Joe Cronin and his staff might do with the 7th, 14th, 34th and 40th picks that they hold in the draft. There’s plenty of time for that between now and June 26.
But as someone who self-admittedly watches zero college basketball and doesn’t pretend to be a draft expert, I was much more curious about why everyone in the NBA seemed to agree that this is one of the worst drafts of the 21st century and if, now that they’re seeing these kids up close, people still think that. That’s the question I’ve spent much of the last two days asking scouts and executives at the combine.
A lot of the team personnel I posed the question to this week significantly dialed back the framing that this draft “sucks,” which had been the prevailing sentiment for several months. Maybe that’s just a rationalization now that these executives have to talk themselves into these players and maybe have their job security judged by whether they take the right one. But rather than “this draft is awful,” two new thoughts have formed that just about everyone agrees on some version of.
One is that, while there’s probably nothing close to a Victor Wembanyama or an Anthony Edwards in this draft class, a true superstar that will set up whoever drafts them for the next 10 years, there are plenty of good rotation players.
The other is that, because there’s no consensus as to who the top picks will be and the gap in talent is so much smaller than it usually is, teams are going to be empowered to go “off the board” rather than feel pressured to take the what “most teams” think is the “best player available” when there’s no consensus as to who the best player available is.
The closest thing to a consensus about the actual prospects is that French big man Alexandre Sarr is likely going No. 1 overall to the Hawks. After that, it’s all over the place. The phrase “eye of the beholder” has come up a lot here. The high-end talent isn’t there to the degree that it is at the top of most drafts—most team personnel I talked to said they felt the players in contention to go first this year are of the talent level of the fifth or sixth pick in a typical draft.
But as one Eastern Conference front-office member pointed out to me, every draft between 2000 and 2020 has produced at least three All-Stars, with most of them having more than that. Even the classes that are viewed as historically bad ones, such as 2000 and 2013, aren’t completely bereft of talent—that talent is just less easy to project. The 2013 draft saw a two-time MVP (Giannis Antetokounmpo) go No. 15 overall and a four-time Defensive Player of the Year (Rudy Gobert) go near the end of the first round, while No. 1 pick Anthony Bennett didn’t even make it to the end of his rookie contract before washing out of the league.
If I had to take a guess at this exact moment, after the combine but before the in-person workouts, as to where the Blazers’ leanings are, assuming Sarr and fellow Frenchman Zaccharie Risacher are off the board, I would keep an eye on Colorado’s Cody Williams at No. 7 and French forward Tidjane Salaun at No. 14 as players who fit the type of prospects this front office likes—if they’re still there.
If they’re still there is the caveat, and it’s harder than ever to project that part. Even if, between now and the draft, people have a good idea of which players certain teams at the top of the draft like (the Spurs, for instance, who hold the No. 4 and 8 overall picks, are believed to be fans of Kentucky guards Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham), every pick in this draft is seemingly up for grabs. With how spread-out teams’ draft evaluations are this year, the belief is that any team that wants to move up to anywhere in the draft, even potentially to the top spot, will be able to. And if a team trades up ahead of the Blazers, that team may have a completely different board than the team they’re trading with, and someone Portland thought would still be there at 7 or 14 may not be.
Only twice in the last 30 years has the No. 1 overall pick been traded before the draft. In 1993, Golden State traded up from 2 to 1 to select Chris Webber, and in 2017, Philadelphia traded up from 3 to 1 with Boston to take Markelle Fultz, while the Celtics took Jayson Tatum with the third pick. If you want to count 2014, when Cleveland took Andrew Wiggins with the first pick and traded him to Minnesota for Kevin Love later that summer, before he’d played his first NBA game, that’s the closest thing besides those.
It would be surprising if Atlanta traded out of the top spot. They appear poised to trade Trae Young this summer, and if you’re going into a rebuild, it’s a good idea to keep the top pick, even in a “down” draft. But on the spectrum of No. 1 picks, this could be one of the more gettable ones. No team that won the Wembanyama lottery last year would have even entertained taking calls to trade it under any circumstances. But if a team wants Alex Sarr that badly that they’re willing to trade up to get him, it’s not impossible.
For all of these reasons, this is shaping up to be one of the strangest and most chaotic predraft processes in recent memory, with no obvious stars and no clarity on where the best talent will be coming from. But contrary to what we’ve heard for the past year, teams believe the talent is there.