Three Years of Retrodictive Draft Rankings, and Some Concluding SL & Olympics Thoughts

Packing a few weeks of articles into one, as I gear up to eventually take a stab at ranking the Top 100 players and trade assets in the NBA

It’s been just over a month since I last posted, and in the meantime, Summer League and the basketball portion of the Olympics wrapped up, and EA released their first college football game in 11 years.¹ But we back.

Today, I’ll knock out three more draft classes of retrodictive rankings and touch on the last month of basketball action. This obviously is just fun content on its own, but having these guys ranked next to each other will help tremendously in my plan to release (and continuously update) “trade value” rankings of at least the Top 100 players+assets in the league later in the off-season.

Before I jump in, I want to give the biggest shout out to Russell Thomas, on Twitter at @RunGoodRussell, for his excellent work on organizing different RAPM/hybrid plus-minus catch-all stats (not to mention making his own!).

Let’s get started working backwards from 2022:

2022 NBA Draft Re-Rank

1. Chet Holmgren

Age: 22.2

EPM: +3.4 (#33 in NBA)

Time-Decay RAPM: +4.3 (#19)

3yr RAPM: +5.3 (#9)

DARKO: +1.9 (#35)

LEBRON: +2.5 (#28)

Chet played 92 games of a possible 92 in his rookie season, and proved in a hurry to be among the league’s best two-way players. His rim-protection is his most obvious difference-making skill, but his incredible efficiency from all over the court on above-average usage might be just as important.²

Yes, he is not the offensive engine that the player who got drafted ahead of him is, but as a rookie he was an elite two-way killer, proving that his impact will likely live in the 4 to 15 range of players for the next decade-plus.

There is a thought on basketball Twitter that Chet > Wemby, and I’d just like to weigh in and say that Chet is two years older, and we cannot compare their rookie stats as though they’re on the same development curve.

Wembanyama was a completely, COMPLETELY different player in his inaugural season as a Spur than he was in France, and there’s basically no telling where he will be in two years — almost certainly, in my opinion, though, ahead of where Chet currently is.

2. Paolo Banchero

Age: 21.7

EPM: +0.4 (#129)

Time-Decay RAPM: -1.7 (#403)

3yr RAPM: +1.4 (#98)

DARKO: -0.5 (#201)

LEBRON: +0.9 (#71)

There is a player who has been significantly better than Paolo at only a year older, but I’m putting a vote of confidence into the 21-year old 6’10” offensive engine with the 15th-highest usage rate in the league.

Paolo has not been very good so far in his career, no matter how loud Orlando Magic fans kick and scream the opposite. He takes over half of his shots from 4 to 22 feet, and he will need to get that number way down or significantly increase his three-point or free-throw rate + efficiency before he ever becomes a Top 25 guy.

He’s in danger of becoming just an alternate version of Jaylen Brown, DeMar DeRozan or De’Aaron Fox at this stage—a fine outcome for a No. 1 pick to be sure, though not a particularly desired one—but he has many years of development left before he’s resigned to that outcome.

3. Jalen Williams

Age: 23.3

EPM: +3.8 (#27)

Time-Decay RAPM: +1.5 (#91)

3yr RAPM: +1.5 (#91)

DARKO: +1.8 (#41)

LEBRON: +0.5 (#103)

J-Dub, like his teammate ranked No. 1, made extremely short work of becoming a two-way star. His star likely will never shine as bright as the two ranked ahead, but Williams pretty handily crushes everyone else in this class.