SPTSJUNKIE’s 2023 NBA Draft Model and Guide

The following is a guest post from longtime community member SPTSJUNKIE. Be sure to check out his fantastic work, and pop over to his new site!

Draft season is once again upon us and we have inched one step closer to the apocalypse as the Kings don’t have a lottery pick.  And not due to incompetence or over-estimating the impact that Marco Belinelli would have on our playoff odds, but due to actual… competence and savvy?

It’s a new emotion and a new day for Kings fans.  And with that new emotion, comes the dawning of a new site for my draft content.  I’m excited to announce that instead of having to search through a 120+ page Google doc, everything is now in a nice clean format made by the programmers of this very site.

Future draft content will be on NBADraftnetwork.com.  The site has my normal rankings and draft models.  But also content and articles from other experienced draft analysts.  And the beloved Consensus Mock Draft work by TKH’s and Kings’ Twitters’ very own Brett Huff.

For those of you not familiar with how my draft projection models work, the short answer is they let computers do math that would take me years. They look at everything from basic box score stats, impact metrics (i.e., Box Score Plus Minus), efficiency statistics (i.e., true shooting percentage), scouting variables (do scouts describe a player as “a high feel player”) combine measurements, and more to try to figure out what makes a college player more likely to be successful in the NBA.

Then they use those metrics to predict how well this year’s prospects will do in their careers and we can see what metrics they used to determine that prediction.

As I caution every year, these models are great for learning, but no credible front office would simply use a model as their draft order.  They are another tool to combine with what we see on film, our intuition, and outside factors.

The models are great to not only understand what players are analytically sound and may project well, but also to re-think some of your preconceived notions and maybe go take a 2nd look at the film of a player the models like or dislike a lot more you do.

Finally, remember the models are based on performance data – they can’t tell if a coach misused a player, had so much talent that a player’s skills were hidden, or had no shooters and a player was swarmed on every drive.

With that said, below are links to two different parts of the site:

For anyone just wanting to quickly look at the models, here is the direct link to the model landing page:

https://nbadraftnetwork.com/models-projections

And here is SPTSJUNKIE’s full 2023 draft guide with the models, player profiles, Synergy statistics, projections, and my recommended picks for the Kings:

https://nbadraftnetwork.com/

This is a living, breathing site, so more modules and updates to the rankings will happen right up to the start of the draft (still have a lot of film notes to write about some of the later first round and second round picks).

I look forward to some discussion and your thoughts and am happy to answer any questions below.