Is the 2024 NBA Draft Really as Bad as Everyone Says it Is?

Making sense of the skepticism around the upcoming draft class.

📸: Stacy Revere, Getty Images

📍 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.