I get a kick out of the fact that teams get graded on their performance in a draft before those players actually play a single NBA game, let alone a season or three.

Since sport writers don’t seem to be able to figure out who the best players are going to be with more than a 20% accuracy, why do they think they can grade how a team does in the NBA Draft with any better than 20% accuracy?

(To be fair, of course, I ought to mention that NBA teams on average don’t choose players with any more accuracy than sports writers, ant that gets a lot of GMs fired).

Let me give you some real examples:

Case #1:  Utah Jazz

The Utah Jazz are given top grades every year, never falling below a B- from any of the top sportswriters (at least not since I can remember).  In the last 5 years, the only players that are currently in Utah from any of those drafts are 2 out of 3 from last year (and maybe that’s just because the Jazz haven’t had the opportunity to trade them yet).

For getting top grades, you wouldn’t think that would be the case.

Of course, there is the possibility that Utah traded them too early, but some of them were injury-prone and got injured, some of them weren’t protected in an expansion draft, some of them were busts, some of them were insubordinate to Jerry Sloan (who isn’t necessarily the easiest coach to work with), and some of them were just buried so far down the depth chart that a new start might end up being a good thing.

Case #2: Toronto Raptors

Toronto drafted Chris Bosh, Rafael Araujo, Charlie Villanueva, and Andrea Bargnani in the top ten over the past four years.

I’m pretty sure they received good grades for Chris Bosh and Andrea Bargnani.  Chris Bosh has worked out.  Andrea has yet to play.

They received mediocre grades for drafting Araujo, who everybody thought was NBA ready but was drafted a little too high.  It turns out he was not ready.  Could he be serviceable in the future?  Yes.  Did he work at all for the Toronto Raptors?  Only if you count that he was traded for Kris Humphries, and Humphries might pan out.

They received poor grades for drafting Villanueva.  In fact, they were the laughing stock of the draft.  A year later, everybody is trying to get Villanueva.  He was one of the top 5 picks of the draft (after the first year).

Case #3: Detroit Pistons

After getting the #2 pick in the draft, Detroit drafts Darko Milicic rather than Carmelo Anthony or Dwyane Wade.  Of course, Detroit is in the strange position of being a top NBA team with no real needs and also having the second best pick in the draft.  Needless to say, they are given top grades for drafting one of the 3 superstar potentials in the draft (with Wade, of course, being overlooked by all of the sports writers not writing for the school newspaper in Marquette).  He still might develop well in Orlando, but Joe Dumars certainly didn’t deserve a top grade for drafting him at #2 to a Detroit team that couldn’t even use him.

Sports writers’ Grades:

Waiting proper amount of time to grade: F

Guessing right: C+ (surprisingly enough, they don’t guess wrong ALL of the time)

Giving readers something to read the day after: A