Most, if not all, NBA draft discussion, whether from major outlets, independent creators dreaming of a front office job, or people just yapping on X or Bluesky, suffers from large flaws rooted in human cognition.
Here are a few of those flaws and the specific biases that drive them.
Player Comparisons (Statistical and Athletic)
People (me included!) love player comparisons. I love to look at them and use them to shape my thinking. Most draft analysts include them in their coverage because they offer a nice shortcut to what feels like understanding. When you’re trying to convey information about anywhere from 30 to 100 players to an audience, it makes sense that you have to cut some corners. Unfortunately, player comparisons heavily bias anyone trying to accurately project prospects due to anchoring bias and availability bias.
Anchoring bias causes us to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we receive about a topic. If the first thing you hear about Cameron Boozer is that he’s like Kevin Love, you are going to be heavily anchored to that as your perception of what sort of player he is and how good he can be.
Part of why player comparisons are so popular is also the exact reason they distort our evaluation. Availability bias is a mental shortcut where you overestimate the likelihood of an outcome based on how easily comparable examples come to mind. If you are anchored to a specific comparison, you will likely overestimate the probability that a prospect turns out exactly like that player simply because it is easy to visualize. Being able to easily picture an outcome is satisfying, which often leads us to dig in further on our initial assessment.
Essentially, player comparisons artificially narrow the aperture for a player’s range of outcomes, leading us to pigeonhole prospects without fully considering their true upside or downside.
Overestimating Our Understanding of Whether “That Will Work in the League”
Seemingly every draft season, players who dominated high-level competition, whether high-major college ball or professionally overseas, face skepticism about whether their style of play will translate to the NBA. Yet, consistently, the players who face these questions outperform prospects with elite athletic tools who produced far less prior to arriving in the NBA. The number one predictor of NBA success is prior success at lower levels of competition, adjusted for age and the strength of that competition.
A big driver of these misevaluations is, once again, availability bias. We only have examples of what is working in the league right now to project forward from, but any look back at basketball history shows that the very best players consistently change how the league works.
When LeBron James (a 1st overall pick) was the best player in the world, everyone was obsessed with wing play as the only way to build a team. Then Steph Curry (the 7th overall pick: labeled too skinny, lacking athletic pop, out of Davidson) arrived, and everyone became obsessed with three-point shooting and small-ball. Later, Giannis Antetokounmpo (the 15th pick, who entered the league incredibly skinny and raw after playing competition so poor it was hard to gauge his talent) and Nikola Jokic (the 41st pick, deemed overweight and unable to jump) took over the league. Those two giants and Joel Embiid (the 3rd overall pick) won MVPs. They’ve been followed by Victor Wembanyama (the 1st pick), so we see big men rule the league again. Even with that shift, parity has risen, and we’ve seen titles and MVP-caliber production come from a wiry, strong, shotmaking savant like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (the 11th pick) and a six-foot-flat brick of a man who can’t jump at all in Jalen Brunson (the 33rd pick).
The point is that there is no single path to greatness. Despite the immense diversity of talent and paths to superstardom that have already proven viable, a ton of perceived certainty remains around which playing styles or athletic profiles can translate to the NBA. This is a mistake. The common denominator among all the players listed above is that they completely dominated whatever level of competition they faced. You can find a bit more certainty in translation the better the competition they played against, but that’s really about it.
To continue the example from the previous section: betting against Cameron Boozer because of minor athletic flaws, like heavy feet or a lack of elite verticality, is poorly reasoned. It ignores the fact that he has absolutely dominated every level of basketball he’s ever played, including being the clear best player in college at just 18 years old.
Reliance on Archetypes and Roles as Heuristics
A very close cousin of the player comparison is the habit of fitting prospects into specific archetypes and roles to quickly convey information. While this serves a highly useful purpose for an audience, it must be used judiciously because it is highly likely to influence the thinking of the evaluator as well. This creates a trap for analysts putting together boards; once again, it narrows the aperture for a player’s range of outcomes and assumes a level of certainty in development that is generally unwarranted.
Because Jalen Brunson is small and unathletic, his archetype and league slotting were pre-determined to be a “bench scorer.” It’s why he fell to the second round, despite a high school and college resume that consistently showed him to be an elite basketball player. Many teams missed out on an on-ball star because of a misapplication of the archetype heuristic.
Similarly, Stephen Curry had the ball constantly at Davidson, making his archetype an on-ball guard. To many, however, he didn’t seem to have the frame to hold up to heavy NBA usage. He turned out to be the greatest shooter of all time, paired with a coach who figured out how to leverage his shooting gravity to create open looks through relentless ball and man movement. (He also got a lot stronger because he is a competitive nut.) Steph’s draft-night archetype as an on-ball guard who might be too thin to carry a full-time workload caused him to slip behind lesser talents. He and Steve Kerr created an entirely new paradigm to unlock his dominance.
The best way to project whether a guy will find a way, or create a brand new archetype, to dominate in the NBA is if he found a way to dominate before getting there. Not every dominant non-NBA pro or college player will successfully transition. In fact, most will fail because it is the best basketball league in the world. Conversely, not every dominant NBA player was a dominant amateur: Anthony Edwards was fairly middling at Georgia, for instance. The vast majority of dominant NBA players, however, were absolutely dominant pre-NBA.
Those are three of the primary errors or flaws I see in most draft discussion. There are others, but this is probably long enough for now. I may return to this with a part 2, but maybe not, dude.
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