Ford: 9 players in 2014 draft would have headlined 2013 version
We've known two things for a long time now: the 2013 NBA draft was historically bad and the 2014 NBA draft is historically strong.
To just what degree those two truths hold, however, and how stark they are juxtaposed against one another, was not entirely clear until Thursday. In his annual "draft tiers" column where he lists prospects in tiers based on how NBA executives rank them, ESPN's draft guru Chad Ford provided us with this nugget:
Last year, Tier 2 also was empty for the first time since I've been doing this column. That should tell you something about how poorly regarded last year's class was. Tier 2 is reserved for players who are projected as potential all-stars by scouts.
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This year, six players are here, which is a high number (as is the case with having three players in Tier 1). Two of these players -- Exum and Vonleh -- even got a couple of votes for Tier 1.
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This means that NBA GMs, scouts and execs believe that there could be as many as nine potential all-stars in the draft class, with three of them being franchise players. You have to go back over a decade -- to the 2003 draft, where eight players ended up making an all-star team -- to get a draft that loaded.
Said differently, this year's draft class has nine players who rank higher than any player ranked in the eyes of scouts and execs last year, which conceivably means that nine players in this year's draft would have been the No. 1 overall pick in 2013.
Poor Anthony Bennett. Not only did he have a terrible rookie season, it will be made to look worse when this year's crop of rookies impress.
The nine names ranked in the top-two tiers, where no players resided last season, are: Andrew Wiggins, Joel Embiid, Jabari Parker (tier one) and Dante Exum, Aaron Gordon, Julius Randle, Dario Saric, Marcus Smart and Noah Vonleh (tier two).
Gary Harris, Doug McDermott and Nik Stauskas all also fall in tier three, the tier occupied last year by Bennett, Nerlens Noel, Ben McLemore, Alex Len, Victor Oladipo and Otto Porter.
The real question, though, is whether we'll see four of these players team up in 2025.