Midterm Assignment
Wenjia Zhang
Cleveland Cavaliers might be the luckiest NBA team on earth when it comes to NBA
Draft, in which they had four number one picks in the past decade. LeBron James, Kyrie
Erving, Anthony Bennett, and Andrew Wiggins were all selected by the Cavs. James and
Erving had successful career so far (and they are now teammates). However, during last
year’s draft, the league were shocked when The Cavs picked Anthony Bennett, given that
they had powerful backcourt players already. It turns out Bennett was, in a way,
overrated. So I found this graph from the Internet and had better understanding about
last year’s NBA Draft.
“Each bubble represents one of the draft-eligible players. The greener dots represent
players who are ranked more highly on the Draft Express list and the dark red dots show
players who didn’t make the list at all. The size of the bubbles represents minutes played
per game; the larger the diameter, the greater the minutes. The y-axis measures college
Midterm Assignment
Wenjia Zhang
performance after the revised position adjustment, while the calculated positions are
shown on the x-axis. Reference lines show standard deviations to give you a sense of the
distribution of the players being measured.”1 Then, I picked out the lottery section of the
draft:
The components of the graph are: numbers, text, circles and colors. As for numbers, the
author used Professor Berri’s NCAA Wins Produced per 40 minutes coefficients2 on the
Y-axis and Estimated NCAA Position with the scale from 1-5 as in basketball 1 means
point guard, 2 means shooting guard, 3 means small forward, 4 means power-forward
and 5 means center. Texts include name, team and position of players. Each circle
Caroline, Ari. "2013 NBA Draft prospect charts." The Wages of Wins Journal | Taking aim at the lies and
damned lies in sports with stories written by the numbers. Last modified June 24, 2013.
http://wagesofwins.com/2013/06/24/2013-nba-draft-prospect-charts/.
2 Dignam, Devin. "Ranking the top 11 NCAA prospects at each position." The Wages of Wins Journal |
Taking aim at the lies and damned lies in sports with stories written by the numbers. Last modified May
28, 2013. http://wagesofwins.com/2013/05/28/ranking-the-top-11-ncaa-prospects-at-each-position/.
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Midterm Assignment
Wenjia Zhang
stands for a player. The bigger the diameter, the greater the minutes. Their likelihood of
being drafted is differentiated by the colors. The author used different saturation and
hues to classify players. Players within the green hue are more valuable to a NBA team
than players within the red hue since they had lower ranks in Draft Express.
The graph can be viewed either by color hues or by positions. This could be very helpful
for NBA team managers and agents. If a team needs a top-rated player to bring the team
back to the spotlight, they will focus on the lottery section to arrange trades and
contracts. However, if a team needs a player with a specific position (in the Cavs’ case,
they needed a power-forward), they could also read this graph by position.
In conclusion, the graph served it purposes very well. However, stats and numbers
simply cannot define a basketball player. There are certain things such as
offensive/defensive awareness and other mental properties that are also important for
becoming a good basketball player.