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Mining for Diamonds
June 24, 2002
In the past four years, the second round of the NBA Draft has been kind to the Seattle Supersonics. They have made (and kept) four second round picks over that span, and also traded one for the rights for a former second-round pick. Not only have all five of those players -- Rashard Lewis, Jelani McCoy, Olumide Oyedeji, Earl Watson, and Predrag Drobnjak -- all made the Sonics' roster, none has played less than Lewis' 145 minutes during their rookie season, and even that came in a lockout-shortened 50 game season. The former three players returned for their second seasons (in McCoy's case a third, Lewis four so far), Drobnjak will return barring a trade, and the Sonics intend to bring Watson back if he is willing to return as a restricted free agent. All told, over their last four second rounds, the Sonics have mined one of the NBA's brightest young stars and four other valuable players. By itself, this is a successful record that deserves to stand alongside the Draft work of any other NBA team. In addition, however, the Sonics have found a number of contributors in 1998 second round picks signed later as free agents -- Ansu Sesay, a strong mid-season acquisition last year who will likely return; Shammond Williams, who has backed up Gary Payton for three years; Ruben Patterson, a starter for one year and key reserve for another before moving on to Portland; and Jerome James, who emerged as the Sonics' starting center during the second half of last season. Even Calvin Booth, last summer's key Seattle free agent, was a second-round pick by Washington in 1999. All told, of the 16 players who took the court for the Sonics last season, a remarkable nine (Lewis, Oyedeji, Watson, Drobnjak, Sesay, Williams, James, Booth, and Randy Livingston) entered the NBA as second-round Draft picks. I'm not sure what that says about the Sonics, but it sure says something. . . . It says, for one thing, that the second round is more valuable than many people believe it to be. Don't be turning off after round one on Wednesday night just because David Stern no longer thinks it important enough to announce the picks (or is that some sort of strange training for Russ Granik?). Based on the Sonics' history with second-round picks, it's reasonable that many Sonics fans expect that the team will pull another rabbit out of the hat this Wednesday with their 49th pick in the 2000 Draft. Before we jump to that conclusion, however, we need to remember that all of the Sonics' previous second-round picks were higher than 49th overall. Lewis was the 30th pick, McCoy the 32nd, Oyedeji the 42nd, Watson the 40th, and Drobnjak was acquired for the 42nd. There is a significant dropoff in quality as the second round proceeds to the final 10 picks of the Draft. In order to get a better idea of what to expect from the Sonics' pick, I decided to take a look at the performance of players selected just before and after the 49th pick in the last four Drafts. I chose to go four picks above and four picks below for nine picks each season and a total of 36. For an extremely quick and dirty measure of effectiveness, all I looked at for each player was their minutes played in each season. These draft picks, their teams, and minutes played by season follow:
One brief note on the table. When two teams are listed, that indicates that the player was drafted by the team on the left but immediately traded to the team on the right. For example, in 2000 the Sonics took Josip Sesar, but his time with the team was brief, as he immediately went on to Boston for two 2001 second-round picks. Actually, I was disappointed and surprised when I took a look at these numbers (and the associated players) this afternoon. I really had expected that even the late part of the Draft would have yielded a number of minor contributors in this day and age. It just seemed to me that most second-round picks made their teams nowadays. Instead, of the 36 players, 16 -- 44% -- have yet to set foot on an NBA court in a game that counts. Only eight of the players have totaled -- totaled, mind you -- more than 500 minutes played. Maybe we shouldn't be counting on that new contributor quite yet. . . . There have been a few gems uncovered late in the last four Drafts. Subjectively, the best of these players has been that big red-headed Canuck from the University of Washington, Todd MacCulloch of the New Jersey Nets. MacCulloch, as you ought to know, started this season for the Eastern Conference's top team and is by all accounts about a league-average center after three years in the NBA, with plenty of room to develop. If the Sonics drafted another MacCulloch, I for one would be ecstatic. The player who has played the most minutes of the group is Memphis swingman Rodney Buford, with most of his minutes earned in this past season with the Grizzlies. I'm not so high on Buford, who seemed to get most of his minutes last year because of a lack of competent alternatives in Memphis (no, I'm not a big Grant Long fan). He has certainly had an interesting career, starting out with the Heat. As I recall it, Pat Riley was fairly fond of Buford, but then he got busted for marijuana -- his third such charge! -- during the 2000 playoffs. He was traded to Charlotte as part of the deal headlined by Jamal Mashburn and Eddie Jones, but cut during training camp. Buford then spent the 2000-01 season with Philadelphia before ending up with Memphis, where he was a major contributor and actually started 21 games. I still don't think he's better than MacCulloch, but he's had a very solid career for the 53rd pick in the Draft. Another strong contributor from this area of the Draft has been Dallas' Greg Buckner, another swingman out of Clemson. After spending his first year in the CBA, Buckner has been a strong bench contributor for the Mavs over the past three seasons in about 20 minutes a night. This year, he started 16 games and shot a fabulous 53% from the field. The one downside for Buckner so far have been injuries which have kept him from contributing more; he only played in 44 games this season and 129 over his three-year career. One pleasant surprise from last year's Draft was Utah's Jarron Collins. Far less heralded than his twin brother Jason (who, if you can make sense of this, was an early-entrant candidate because injuries had caused him to redshirt, while Jarron did not), Collins was not expected to play much for the Jazz this season. They brought in free agent John Amaechi to complement longtime center Greg Ostertag, but instead it was Collins who started 68 games and did a competent job. He especially plagued the Sonics, notching career-highs of 22 points and 10 rebounds (his only double- double of the year) on January 16 in a 95-80 victory at the Delta Center. More impressively, he made all nine of his attempts in that game. Collins looks to have a bright future ahead of him. Beyond these four players, the only other one to play 500 minutes in a season has been Minnesota's Loren Woods last season. Given the fact that he ended the year out of the rotation following Minnesota's trade for Marc Jackson, I must say I'd be hard-pressed to call his career with the Wolves a 'success' just yet. That points out a significant problem with this whole process, in that it's too early to make a call either way on the careers of many of these players. I note that a player like Sesar has yet to step onto an NBA court, but that doesn't mean he never will. Were I doing a similar exercise a year ago, for example, I might have reported that Drobnjak was a bust. He took four years to come over, and there's no reason some of these foreign players might not have the same career arc. As well, there are many young Americans like Phoenix's Alton Ford, Jr., an early-entrant after only one year at Houston University, and high schooler Ousmane Cisse. Both of these players still have many years to put together a successful career, and one year is far too early to write them off. My next move was to try to sort these players by what I see as the main groups of players taken in the second round: College stars whose game is not expected to the NBA; young players with potential who are too risky to be first-rounders; foreigners; slipping first-rounders; and 'others'. The most prominent group, in my estimation, is successful college players. I identified fully half of the 36 players in this category. Eight players I considered taken based on potential, four were Europeans, and only Woods a slider. The final five players I considered 'others'. The most successful category was easily the fallen first-rounders (Woods), with an 'average' of 516 minutes played per year. Of the real groups, the best-fairing was the potential players, led by Buford and Ford, with an average of 195. Thanks to the contributions of Buckner, the 'others' placed next, averaging 181, followed by the seniors at 167. The Europeans easily brought up the rear, as Memphis' Antonis Fotsis is the only one who has yet to come over. They averaged 80 minutes per season. Such a small study is, of course, not anything I'd want to hang my hat on. But it certainly improves my opinion of going after the two high schoolers expected to be around when the Sonics select this year, New York shooting guard Lenny Cooke and California big man DeAngelo Collins. Considering I also think that those two positions are the Sonics' biggest needs, maybe taking one of those two players makes a lot more sense than I've given it credit before.
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