If you want a draft a future All-NBA player — that is, one of the top 15 players in the league in any given year — do you need to be picking in the top five? Or, can you find them elsewhere? I put together this chart to illustrate the data.
Here’s where NBA stars are most likely to be drafted
Where are you most likely to find a superstar talent in the draft? Are they always drafted in the top five, or is there reason for teams picking later to have hope.
Ronald Martinez
There have been 51 different players named to an All-NBA team over the past 10 seasons. Below, you can see what percentage of them were picked in what range.
Ten of 51 All-NBA players were No. 1 overall picks, but there were nine more who went Nos. 2 or 3. It’s a bit surprising, though, that nearly half — 25 of the 51 — of the All-NBA players from the past decade were picked outside the top five. That shows a good bit of top-line value beyond the big names.
That said, half of those All-NBA picks outside the top five were taken in Nos. 6-10. (Odd quirk: there hasn’t been a single No. 8 pick on the All-NBA team in the past decade, but several No. 9s and 10s.) So less than a quarter of the All-NBA players in our sample were taken outside the top 10, and a quarter of those were second-rounders, usually international prospects who didn’t jump to the league immediately.
What is interesting is that the late lottery has produced fewer stars than the first six non-lottery picks (Nos. 15-20). That may be a function of better teams picking in the late teens than in the late lottery.
This only considers star players, of course; a chart looking at starters or rotation players would be mighty different. But since most teams want to pick stars above all, it’s a useful way of looking at things.
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