And exactly where were Keyonte and Jokic drafted?
If you were to take where Jokic was drafted (#41) and put a range up three spots from there and down three spots from there, which cohort would yield more all-stars than, say, even number 5 by itself?
Landing a dud in the top 10 sticks out like a sore thumb because the expectation, whereas landing a dud at 20 or beyond is easy to forget and less likely to produce an availability bias. We’ve had very few top 10 picks so things like Exum and Kanter stand out, and we forget about Deron Williams because that’s the expected result. Things like Rudy and John and Karl and Millsap and even Donovan stand out for their position, but then we’ve also got a lot of guys like Quincy Lewis and Scott Padgett and Raul Lopez and Kirk Snyder and Curtis Borchardt and Morris Almond and Eric Maynor and Kosta Koufos and Trey Lyles and Luther Wright and Erick Murdock. How often have you thought of any of those guys in the past 5 years?
There are numerous ways in which we take statistics in one context and inappropriately try to superimpose it into another where we get the wrong answer. An example would be learning that the risk for Down syndrome is increased drastically by advanced maternal age (5-fold increase over 35 and up to 16-fold increase above 40). You then ask what the typical demographics are for a mother of a child who has Down syndrome, and you’d be inclined to say advanced maternal age but the age demographics of those mothers is roughly in line with typical age demographics of all other pregnancies — that’s the age group having most of the children, whereas those with advanced maternal age are such a minority of live births when you look at the whole picture. But if you’re asking what increases the
risk for it, you can’t appeal to the paucity of live births after 40 to say that because there aren’t a significant amount by
volume that there isn’t a drastic difference in
risk.
So yes, the vast majority of our strongest players in franchise history have been taken outside the lottery…. because that’s where the vast majority of our picks have been made from. But if you break down our actual hit rate, it’s higher on the higher picks than it is the lower ones, even if it doesn’t intuitively appear that way, again because it’s too easy to conflate volume and rate as being the same thing.