SLC Dunk - How Much Value the Utah Jazz Lost Dropping to 10th in the Draft

[Tavan Parker]

Sunday was a pretty disappointing day for Jazz Nation. After tanking the latter portion of the season, the Jazz had fairly good odds to jump into the top 4 of the 2024 NBA draft. Instead, they dropped not one but two slots to the #10 spot.

This was, in my opinion, the worst-case outcome going into the lottery. Not only did the Jazz not improve their draft position, but they actually ended up with the worst possible pick while still owing the OKC Thunder a first rounder thanks to the disastrous Derrick Favors salary dump.

It was bad all around. Honestly, the only thing positive you could say was, “well, at least we aren’t the Detroit Pistons!”

That got me thinking, just how bad was this outcome? And after doing some research on every lottery pick since 2010, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Obviously the higher the draft pick the better off you’ll be, generally speaking. But at the end of the day, a franchise’s ability to identify and develop talent is far more important than draft position (other than a top 3 pick, which Danny Ainge has defined as being the “franchise changing” range).

Win Shares​

I focused on 2 simple data points to gauge the relative value of each draft position. First was the average number of win shares over a prospect’s career. And what do you know, having the #1 overall pick usually leads to the player that gets the most win shares from their draft class. That said, the #2 pick has a tendency to bomb expectations and the #3 pick does extremely well. A perfect example of this is the 2012 draft. Anthony Davis was the #1 overall pick, followed by Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and then Bradley Beal at #3.

The rest of the lottery tends to be pretty hit or miss, something NBA fans have a hard time accepting going into each draft. Everyone hopes, assumes, and even expects their favorite team to hit every year and that’s just not the reality. So if there was ever a year where you had bad lottery luck and moved down in draft position, one where picks 2-10 are all viewed pretty equivalently would be the one to do it.

I could see 2024 end up looking like the 2013 draft, where it was largely disappointing but there’s still really good NBA talent at each draft phase. Victor Oladipo at #2, CJ McCollum at #10, Giannis Antetokounmpo at #15, and Rudy Gobert at #27.

Player Ceiling​

Win Shares obviously isn’t a perfect metric, so I wanted to look at this from a more eye-test perspective as well. For example, John Wall was the #1 pick back in 2010. He only accumulated 44.5 win shares in his career due to injuries, but his peak was an All-NBA player. So I reviewed each pick individually and assigned them a point value based on the following completely made up system:

Is this subjective? Yes, but I’d be willing to bet that people could agree on 80+% of the point assignments. Additionally, I had to take some liberties on the most recent 2-3 drafts where outcomes aren’t fully projectable yet. This was intended to be a simple exercise to gauge relative value of each draft position, but the trendline ended up looking pretty similar to the win shares graph above.

So did the Utah Jazz really lose that much long term value in their pick dropping from 8th to 10th? Not necessarily no. In recent years, the 8th pick has gotten you Franz Wagner or Jaxson Hayes. Comparatively, the 10th pick has gotten you Mikal Bridges or Ziaire Williams. I’d much rather jump into the top 4 of say, the 2025 draft, where you could argue that even the 4th pick would be better than the #1 overall in the 2024 draft.

That said, even “bad” drafts end up with ~4 All-Star level talents mixed throughout. And in a flat draft like this one is projected to be, trading up may not be as costly as usual. So it’s up to Danny Ainge and Justin Zanik to go out and find one of those diamonds in the rough. With 3 solid picks in this year’s draft (#10, #29, and #32), they should be able to move around and come away with one of their top targets.

Who might that be!?

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