Cleveland Cavs draft postmortem

The past two drafts have seen the Cavs take 3 on ball scoring guards in the first round plus a 2/3 wing.  In the second year of a major rebuild they are looking for top end stars, players talented enough to carry a team back into playoff contention, and nothing else particularly matters out of these picks.  Step one is to guess at how likely it is the Cavs landed a star with the #5, #8, #26 or #30 selection given the position they selected.  Initially I was pretty surprised by the results, going back to all the drafts between 2001 and 2015 I counted the total number of on ball guards taken in the top 10 picks and binned either in 'good enough to carry a team to the playoffs consistently' and 'not good enough'.  I came away with 11 instances plus Victor Oladipo, and I was fairly stringent in my selections leaving Mike Conley, Kemba Walker and DeMar DeRozen on the outside looking in.  The list goes

Oladipo, Lillard, Irving, Wall, Harden, Curry, Rose, Westbrook, Roy, Deron, Chris Paul, Wade.  

With only 48 guards taken by my count that is a ridiculously high 'star' hit rate of 25%, and pretty hard to trim down. Sure maybe you argue against Oladipo, but its still a very high hit rate with quite a few near misses who are valuable players.  

The hit rate is so high primarily because almost not great guards have gone outside the top 10.  Jimmy Butler (#30) I would say deserves inclusion in the group and Isaiah Thomas (#60) and Kyle Lowry (#24) could be debated or Klay at #11.  No matter who you would put on either side of the threashold it is fairly clear that most of the great guards in the recent past have come in the top 10 and eyeballing some data I would say that production for this position is the most heavily weighted towards top 10 selections.  If you accept my list then it is even more heavily weighted to the top 7 or top 6.  Only Curry on my list was outside the top 6 and there were 7 guards taken at #7 and 13 taken between 8 and 10.  The hit rate between #1 and #7 is 35% and between #1 and #6 is 39%.  

This year the Cavs took Darius Garland at number 5, so a few approaches.  One is the hit rate for guards taken at 4, 5 or 6.  5 guards make my list out of 17 selections, a 29% hit rate.  1 was taken at 5 exactly out of 6 selections or 17%, and 4 were taken 5, 6 or 7 out of 18 for 22%.  So a reasonable placeholder range for Garland's chance at high end success is 15-30%.  

I don't think it matters that Garland was not the first guard taken, Westbrook wasn't, nor was CP3, Curry, or Lillard.  

The numbers don't favor Sexton at all, none of the guards drafted between 8-10 made the list, and one at 7.  His range for top end outcome would be 0-8%.  The major encouraging factor for him is that two guards just below the cutoff went #9 (DDR and Kemba) and using them you get a 33% hit rate for the 8+9 picks, 15% for 8, 9 and 10.  

The numbers for Windler and Porter are very bleak.  If we take Butler as the only example and assume that 40% of players taken between #20 and #30 are guards the hit rate for studs is around 1.67%. Add in Lowry and you can double it to 3.2%!  Obviously this is even more fraught than our other estimates, but its a good enough start.  Using the midpoints we have a 22.5% chance for Garland, a 4% chance for Sexton and a 1.67% chance each for Windler and Porter, and the Cavs have a 28% chance that at least one of these 4 guys will be a high end.

That is a rough outlook for the Cavs, and the reality of not landing a top 3 pick in either draft.  They are headed back to the lottery for one more go at the ping pong balls, and by the numbers they should.  It will be awkward if they end up with another pick in the 4-6 range and are staring at on ball guards and they probably need to do a lot of prep to ensure that they don't knee jerk away from taking another one because they need to keep boosting their odds.