2015 NBA Draft Collective Rankings: Feb 26th

2015 NBA Draft Collective Rankings: Feb 26th

As we approach the last few weeks of the college basketball regular season, top players are putting it all on the line.  Not only are these guys playing for their respective team's success, but some may actually have a shot at being selected in the 2015 NBA draft.  I've been an avid basketball lover for many years and have had an especially strong affinity for the NBA draft.  One of my favorite pastimes over the years is to look at mock drafts to see what college players to keep an eye on.  For over ten years, websites such as NBADraft.net and DraftExpress.com have kept my mind occupied on the subject of the draft, and to them I am grateful.  

The sites mentioned above, as well as ESPN, each have their own ranking or "Big Board" of 100 of the top prospects in the world.  This differs from a mock draft in that these players are usually ranked by pure potential, rather than what team might pick them during the draft.  As of now in late February, the bottom-dweller teams of the NBA are still jockeying for position and ping-pong balls, so the draft order is far from set.  The final fate of these teams' drafting order will be decided by the draft lottery on May 19th.

Today, I was curious to see where my favorite top 100 boards ranked some of the projected lottery players.  I took the DraftExpress, NBADraft.net and Chad Ford rankings and created a "collective" grouping by calculating the averages of the top players to see where they fall:

Player	Average
Jahlil Okafor	1
Karl-Anthony Towns	3
Emmanuel Mudiay	3
D'Angelo Russell	4
Stanley Johnson	6
Kristaps Porzingis	8
Mario Hezonja	8
Myles Turner	8
Kevon Looney	9
Willie Cauley-Stein	9
Kelly Oubre	10
Justise Winslow	12
Devin Booker	14
Frank Kaminsky	14
Trey Lyles	14

The top four players in the table above are grouped near the top in all of the boards, but from there the rankings are all over the place.  This is to be expected because even on draft day, many of us are left in shock as players are picked way higher than expected, while others slide or even free-fall beyond any pundit's mock draft projection. 

That factor of surprise is what makes the draft so interesting, especially when your team is near the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it) of the draft and you're hoping for a young, talented savior to become the next NBA superstar.  

Over the next few weeks, I'll chime in on each of the top players and discuss their strengths and weaknesses, along with projections of how their career might play out in the NBA.  If you're reading these installments, you probably won't learn anything earth-shattering, but I hope to get some of my thoughts out there for posterity's sake.  Let's see where it takes us.