Full 2011 NBA Draft Prospect Overview

New readers, please check out the basics before leaving any comments.

**(Note: the images are too large to be properly uploaded into Blogger, so I will be moving them into Google Docs format)**


About a month ago I posted my numberless preview of the NBA draft. The draft is coming up this Thursday, so now's the time to put out the full version of the post (it's been ready for a whole month, I swear!).

In case you've been stuck under a rock for the past few months, you'll know that the NBA draft is coming up shortly. My team of choice (for now....) is the Toronto Raptors; the Raptors will have the fifth pick this year. My question is, according to the numbers, which players should the Raptors (or any other team, for that matter) target?

2011 NBA Draft Prospects Overview

New readers, please check out the basics before leaving any comments.


In case you've been stuck under a rock for the past few months, you'll know that the NBA draft is coming up shortly. My team of choice (for now....) is the Toronto Raptors; the Raptors will likely have a top three pick and can fall no lower than 6th. My question is, according to the numbers, which players should the Raptors (or any other team, for that matter) target?

Well, I have a post written up and ready with all of the numbers included, but I'm actually going to keep that unpublished until right before the draft. Why? Let's just say that it'll be some good content to help launch a new website. So for now, I'm going to operate contrary to my normal M.O. and post some stat-free player assessments, organized into five categories: players to avoid, promising players, overrated players, underrated players, and "mystery box" players

No, no, no: DeMar DeRozan is not the MIP

New readers, please check out the basics before leaving any comments.


During the Raptors’ blowout loss at the hands of the Nuggets, I listened in disbelief as the commentators - Matt Devlin and Jack Armstrong - made the case that DeMar DeRozan should be in the running for the Most Improved Player (MIP) award. Now, I’ve already written about this in the past, but the fact that this idea is still out there means that I need to keep addressing this topic.


The argument for DeRozan as the MIP

During the game, the stat used to back up this argument was...drumroll...PPG increase from last season. Here were the names that they included on the graphic that popped up onto the screen:

Basketball Research: take it to the bank

New readers, please check out the basics before leaving any comments.


I've subscribed to ScienceDaily's daily RSS feed (yes, I'm a big nerd; but everyone knew that already). Every day I skim through the articles to see if there are any interesting new scientific developments; today I noticed an article on bankshots in basketball.

I haven't taken an in-depth look at the methodology of the research, but from the summary and the accompanying image, it seems that this article supports conventional basketball wisdom and my own observations - which is that there are some spots on the floor where it is easier to make a basket if you go for a bankshot instead of a direct shot. Of course, if you have been paying any attention to the career of Timmy "D&D" Duncan, you'd probably know that too.

But to me this was the more interesting tidbit:

The 50 greatest NBA players of all-time

New readers, please check out the basics before leaving any comments.


Given the team's record right now, Raptor news is a bit boring these days; eventually I will take another look at how the individual players have been playing, but Nerd Numbers is down (and the Game Splits tool - which I had just started to rely on for my weekly player evaluations - has been down for a while now). So today I will write about a topic that is barely even tangentially related to the Raptors - my version of the NBA's 50 greatest players.

Rookie Challenge Rosters

New readers, please check out the basics before you leave any comments.


On Tuesday the lineups for the All-Star Rookie Challenge game were released. Andres of Nerd Numbers already wrote a post about which team he thinks will win, but I want to look at those names a different way. According to ESPN, the rookie roster is as follows:

• Blake Griffin
• Landry Fields
• John Wall
• DeMarcus Cousins
• Greg Monroe
• Derek Favors
• Gary Neal
• Wesley Johnson
• Eric Bledsoe

It's a pretty decent team; as Dre notes, it's good enough to be favoured over the sophomore team. But I wonder - are there some rookies who got snubbed? Check out this table (full version here):