Re-Drafting the 2013 NBA Draft Using Advanced Analytics
What Happened
To recap, here are the top 10 picks of the 2013 NBA Draft, including each player's career measures in value over replacement player (VORP), nERD, win shares per 48 minutes, and total win shares.
If you're not familiar with nERD, it is our proprietary metric that combines several offensive, defensive, and usage factors to produce one number that is meant to project a player's overall value to his team. That final number is an estimate of how many games above or below .500 a league-average team would win over an 82-game season with the player in question as one of its starters. The nERDs listed below are cumulative from each player's first game until the end of the 2015-16 season.
| Pick | Team | Player | VORP | nERD | WS/48 | WS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cleveland | Anthony Bennett | -1.7 | -7.3 | .001 | 0.0 |
| 2 | Orlando | Victor Oladipo | 4.3 | -13.0 | .063 | 9.7 |
| 3 | Washington | Otto Porter | 2.4 | 1.2 | .099 | 8.3 |
| 4 | Charlotte | Cody Zeller | 2.5 | 7.0 | .131 | 12.7 |
| 5 | Phoenix | Alex Len | -0.7 | -5.6 | .064 | 4.9 |
| 6 | New Orleans | Nerlens Noel | 3.0 | -3.4 | .079 | 7.0 |
| 7 | Sacramento | Ben McLemore | -0.3 | -19.6 | .027 | 3.6 |
| 8 | Detroit | Kentavious Caldwell-Pope | 2.8 | -8.6 | .069 | 10.0 |
| 9 | Minnesota | Trey Burke | -0.3 | -14.6 | .044 | 5.4 |
| 10 | Portland | C.J. McCollum | 1.8 | -1.6 | .091 | 8.0 |
Heading into the draft, there was no true consensus first overall pick. Nerlens Noel of the University of Kentucky previously projected as such, but his tearing the ACL in his left knee in February of 2013 made him a huge question mark. It was a growing concern that he would have to miss some or all of his supposed rookie year in 2013-14 and that would have made him a hard sell on a fanbase of any lottery team that was hungry for a franchise savior and a few W's.
Beyond Noel, Indiana's Victor Oladipo was viewed by some as the most talented player coming into the draft, while Alex Len from Ukraine had the size and long-term upside to perhaps warrant being taken first overall. Regardless, basically every player on the draft board was a flier (even more so than usual) and there was nothing close to a sure thing in the bunch.
Cleveland was in a hard spot. They had taken Kyrie Irving with the first overall pick in the 2011 draft (which we recently re-drafted), but were still reeling after three straight seasons with fewer than 25 wins following the departure of LeBron James for the Miami Heat in 2010. Kyrie looked every bit the part of a franchise player, but adding another one would surely help Cavs fans finally suture up the wounds that they had been licking since King James took his you-know-what to you-know-where.
Well, that may have been possible in just about any other draft. In 2013, that "Next Coming" simply wasn't coming. The Cavs swung for the fences with Bennett and they missed. Badly.
Then again, what would have been a better selection? The rest of the top ten played out more or less exactly as DraftExpress.com predicted in their final mock draft, with minor shuffling.
Three years later, Victor Oladipo, C.J. McCollum, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope are the only set-in-stone starters on their respective teams from the above batch. Neither is a franchise player at the level of a Kyrie Irving. At least no one that was selected in the top ten qualifies as such, despite the fact that they were selected pretty much to chalk with most draft experts beyond Bennett being selected so high.
Where were those potential stars and building blocks? They were few and far between, but it turns out that they were selected in the mid- to late-first round.
