Victor Wembanyama and Adam Silver's Foolish Plea
A personal look at why the NBA draft is a perfect trap.
Recently Victor Wembanyama did “very well” in two G-League games. With the NBA season almost upon us, of course, the right story to take off is which player would be the best in the next NBA draft. It even prompted Adam Silver to ask teams not to tank for him!
One of the most well-known “secret” processes of bad teams is tanking. For those unfamiliar - the NBA, like other North American sports leagues, has a draft. Incoming prospects are pre-selected by teams. The NBA uses a draft lottery. Based on how poorly a team performs, it gets better odds at a higher selection. They pick ping pong balls out of a lottery hopper to decide the “winners.” The logic, which has been flawed for a long time, we’ll get there, is that bad teams can get better new players and improve, thus keeping the league fairer. But even if this logic held, which it doesn’t, it’s fundamentally doomed to fail. And it reminds me of a personal story from my history.
Learning About Teaching
Years ago, I was a teacher’s assistant in graduate school. Our school had an important period - the W Drop. Essentially, you were allowed to withdraw (hence the W) from a class close to halfway through the semester. A W would be placed on your transcript, but your GPA would not be impacted, and you would be allowed to retake the class. I could easily determine via some simple math a good number of students were failing the class and had almost no chance of passing as the material got harder. It turns out I wasn’t allowed to directly approach students and say - “You’re failing. You should withdraw from this course.” but I was allowed to make a generic email that gave each student grade information, inform them of the W drop, and its benefits to your GPA. You will be shocked to discover not a single student that received the W-drop email dropped the course. And, if I recall, none of them passed it either.
There were two reasons this happened, and both apply to the NBA. The first is the Dunning-Kruger effect. A paradoxical point is - to realize how bad you are at something, you must first get at least proficient at it, even to start judging how bad you are. The worst set of students to judge their shot at passing the course were, of course, the students doing worst in the course. A few of them that did attempt to salvage their GPAs during my office hours seemed blissfully naive to this.
A second, maybe less depressing reality is that there was a financial incentive for some of them. As more established professors let me know, some financial aid might require a certain course load. As such, students risked losing money by withdrawing from the course. Some of them even noted they could stay in the course and at least get more information for when they did invariably retake it, and hopefully, their financial aid would be able to sustain the GPA hit.
Both of these reasons apply to the NBA! Dave Berri’s research on the NBA draft notes that roughly 40% of the variation in NBA performance can be explained by college data (for players in the NCAA). And this performance, by the way, outperforms the variation explained by where players are selected in the draft. This news means two things - while there is a lot of useful data to judge players on, teams are bad at it. And, even if they were good at it, it would still be a very hard problem to select the right players.
The NBA, every year, sends its failing students an extra credit assignment to help their grades. But, the irony is, the extra credit assignment is orders of magnitude harder than the assignment they failed!
But, a second point, which my cohost Brian Foster has brought up routinely on the Boxscore Geeks show, is that the people in charge of drafting have a different incentive in mind. A GM in charge of a weak squad can inform their management - “We’re slated to win 30 games. I can make some decent moves and maybe get us to 40 wins. We might still miss the playoffs, and likely won’t get a good draft pick. But our ticket sales will go up a little.” This GM might soon see the door. Or, they can say - “We need to blow it up! Yes, we’ll be bad, but there’s a loaded draft next year! We could get the next LeBron, or Wade, or Bosh!” And, at least for the history of the NBA, this sale pitch has worked as long as you don’t do it as flagrantly as Sam Hinkie did with the 76ers. GMs and coaches would rather continue a failing course to keep their financial aid than wisely drop the course to help raise their GPA by a random decimal point or two.
Those That Forget History
The draft, by its nature, is set up as an alluring trap. It’s a convenient excuse for weak front offices to stick around a little longer. The very numbers of getting a top pick (14% for the worst team in the NBA), let alone the odds of getting a decent NBA player with a top pick (< 50% as per research by Dave Berri years ago), say the best strategy is not to even be in the NBA draft lottery. But anyone good enough to understand those odds would probably do a better job constructing a team where the game is all about understanding numbers and odds.
And the odds of getting a productive player are the key. The history of the NBA is littered with great players who would be the next big thing. Ralph Sampson was almost enough for the Lakers to give up multiple Finals MVPs. He had a decent NBA career before declining rapidly due to injuries. On paper, Kevin Durant and Michael Beasley looked like a great pickups with the number two pick. Their careers diverged about as wildly as possible. And that brings us to Wembanyama. Two G-League games have everyone excited. And certainly, a 7-4 player that handles the ball like a point guard and can shoot three? The eye test, as per Twitter, loves this guy.
But the numbers are a little funnier. Ultimate Warriors Fan, Jeremy, passed along Wembanyama’s G-League game (October 4th — boxscore here) and asked if I was impressed by it. As a former teacher, the trap of knowing full well the answer was “no” was in front of me.
Wembanyama scored 37 points on 7-11 from three-point shooting. And that feels good, right? A giant that can shoot like Steph Curry? But while it’s easy to focus on the scoring, a thing Jeremy noticed? Victor only had four rebounds. That seems low, right? Also, let’s note the scoring. 21 points came from great three-point shooting, but the remaining 16? 4-9 from two, and 12-16 from the line. Those don’t instill a lot of confidence. The net result was 59.6% True Shooting. And that’s good. But not that great, especially when you factor in amazing three-point scoring for the night.
His follow-up on the 6th (Boxscore here) is much easier to dissect. He followed up a 37-point performance with a 36-point performance! Great right? The great three-point shooting didn’t hold. At 2-7 from the arc, Wembanyama’s True Shooting wound up at 57.9%. His rebounds did go up to 11. But this is what’s tough, this wasn’t a dominant amazing performance. It was fine. And this was in the G-League, not the NBA. And if we hop to a bigger sample size than two games? Things don’t look so great.
RealGM has Victor’s international stats, and here are the per48 minutes Wembanyama:
20.8 Points per 48 (on 49.3% True Shooting). As a comparison, Westbrook was considered, by many, to have fallen off a cliff this season. His True Shooting? 51.2%. 49.3% is almost a full 4% below the worst shooting team in the NBA last season (the OKC Thunder at 53%)
8.5 Defensive Rebounds, 3.1 Offensive Rebounds, 11.6 Total rebounds per 48. This matches Damian Jones, a journeyman on a minimum contract for the Lakers.
The one amazingly good area is Victor’s blocks. At 4.7 per 48, he’d easily be the best in the league.
Let’s stress these stats are in the French Jeep Elite and Euroleague, not the NBA. The reality is any player coming into the NBA should dominate their league first. Past performance is no guarantee of future success, but at the moment, I’m not as hyped as everyone else. This reminds me of a fun scene from the movie Moneyball:
Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, asks a very simple question - “If he’s such a good hitter, why can’t he hit good?” Wembanyama passes the eye test. He’s a giant with a good-looking shot. But somehow, against weaker opponents, he can’t shoot. Despite having a huge height advantage, he rebounds at a backup rate. Now, he’s young and can easily improve. But the idea, for instance, that he is the best prospect since LeBron? I’d pause for a moment on that.
Regardless, multiple NBA teams already not great at the numbers will say their plans are around acquiring Victor Wembanyama. And, as long as he scores 20 points a game, this plan will be deemed a success. And maybe he’ll turn into a great player after a few seasons, and this article will age poorly. But I’m more inclined to bet that whatever team gets Victor will not be victorious for quite a while. However, even Adam Silver can tell none of this information will matter to teams, and we’re in for a long season hearing about which team might win the lottery.
-Dre