Search on “NBA 2023 Mock Draft” on any engine and you’ll get pages of hits. Everybody has a mock draft. They appear out of the ether every draft season, often from unrecognizable sources. And we click on those links, don’t we? Over and over again, we click. The temptation is just too much. Who will be there? Who will our team pick? We’re sure that the next click will yield the right answer. But will it?
One might presume that sports journalists who study the NBA and are close to its teams and their managers, particularly those from national outlets, should be able to bring their assets and their expertise and connections to bear to produce an accurate projection of how an NBA draft will go. A comparison, however, of recent draft predictions with actual draft results, conducted by Lower the Rim’s crack research team, indicates that there are many more misses than hits in mock draft projections, even when the biggest of names are making the projections. The discrepancies are likely not the result of lack of effort. Although many of the more obscure mock-draft web sites and blogs appear to be just throwing stuff up there or mimicking the guesses from more substantial sources, most of the major players in the mock-draft game look to be doing their homework as best they can. But very few media folk have ever made a living assessing talent. There’s a skill difference between the mock drafters, even the best of them, and the people who do this for a living for NBA teams. The motivation for the process is also different. The NBA team’s goal in ranking talent is to gather the best intel to get their professionals on the right players to make the correct decision for the long-term benefit of their club. The media’s goal is to entertain you, right now. Then there’s those pesky day-of-the-draft trades. It should be no surprise, therefore, that NBA mock drafts look significantly different than what Adam Silver and his minions reveal during the real draft.
So, are they any good or not? We know you’re going to keep clicking. You might as well know what you’re in for and where to look for the best predictions. To help settle the garbage-not-garbage question, Lower the Rim looked at the last four draft season’s first-round projections made by six major NBA media outlets. Our contestants were: 1) The Sporting News (multiple authors), 2) The Ringer (Kevin O’Connor), 3) ESPN (Jonathan Givony), 4) Bleacher Report (Jonathan Wasserman), 5) The Athletic (Sam Vecenie), and 6) Sports Illustrated (Jeremy Woo). We used only very recent drafts to keep the conditions of the mock drafts, principally the drafts authors, consistent with the 2023 mock drafts. The Sporting News used different journalists or staffs from 2019 through 2022; Sports Illustrated’s past four mock drafts were produced by Jeremy Woo, their 2023 was authored by Matt Babcock; all other outlets used the same journalist to produce their mock drafts in the reviewed 2019-2022 seasons and this 2023 mock draft.
The method–we summed the differences (residuals) between the mock predictions and actual draft positions and tallied the number of correct picks made by each publication each season as the metrics for accuracy. [We note that each of the four drafts reviewed included some players that the mock drafters did not predict would be drafted in the first round. Since not all reviewed mock drafts included second-round projections, in those cases, we assigned a mock draft predicted pick 35th for those players].
The result–not all mock drafts are created equal! Even using a limited number of past drafts, a significant and consistent difference was seen in the accuracy of the mock drafts among the reviewed media outlets. ESPN’s Jonathan Givony was the cream of this crop with predictions that on average were within about 3.6 draft positions of the actual pick. Givony also hit on 32 correct picks (27% of all picks) over the four seasons of mock drafts. The Sporting News and The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor were the dogs in this show with only 15 and 18 correct picks respectively and predictions that were off on average by 4.7 picks. Sports Illustrated’s Jeremy Woo (26 correct picks), Bleacher Report’s Jonathan Wasserman (28 correct picks), and The Athletic’s Sam Vecenie (26 picks) were all respectable runners-up to Givony.
So, “garbage” may be too harsh a term to describe NBA mock drafts (several headline writers heads have rolled). We were generally impressed with the accuracy of the mock drafts and mildly surprised at the consistent differences among the publishing outlets. Remember this however, even the best at this business (ESPN’s Givony by our measure) is only hitting on a quarter of his picks—mock drafts are still more fantasy and fun than accurate models.
Below are our contestant mock drafters current (some are changing by the hour though) first-round picks for the Utah Jazz in Thursday’s 2023 draft. Regardless of which one of these groupings you would prefer, history is telling us that ESPN’s Utah picks are the more likely to be correct—Cam Whitmore, Bilal Coulibaly, Maxwell Lewis here we come.
