The NBA Draft is now less than a week away and the Minnesota Timberwolves have the number one pick in the draft. In what many are calling a weak draft class, the team is facing a big problem in talent evaluation: a lack of analytics.
The widely agreed-upon top three players in the draft, LeMelo Ball, James Wiseman and Anthony Edwards are all players who have had very few games past high school for teams to evaluate. LeMelo Ball played a few games in Australia. Edwards played only his freshman season at Georgia. Wiseman played in only three games after being caught up in a recruiting scandal at Memphis. Analytics-heavy Timberwolves Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations Sachin Gupta says that game data isn't the only tool they have to evaluate talent.
"It's very true for a lot of these guys that don't have a lot of information to go off of. But, we do take into account the information that we do have. Beyond game data, we know a player's physical measurements, their height and wingspan and in some cases their verticals and athletic testing. We know the level of competition at which they played at and their age. So, we take as much information as we have into account and try to make the best decision. We also understand that when we don't have much information there's a wide variance in that players' likely outcome."
Gupta, who was one of the architects in Houston who brought James Harden to the Rockets, says that a players talent isn't the only attribute they're looking for. He says that locker room fit, growth mindset and love of the game are very important to the team and something they study on each player they are considering.
While many NBA insiders say that the 2020 draft class is one of the worst in history, Gupta says that we won't know how good this class is for 3-4 years and that experts who have called other draft classes "weak" were proven wrong.
"If you look at draft classes from the past that were deemed to be weak, some of those classes produced MVPs and Defensive Players of the Year in that same draft in the middle of the first round and late in the first round. The talent is there. It's our job to find it."
The NBA Draft is Wednesday, November 18th.