3-Year Running NBA Big Board

Fuuuuuture......Fuuuuuuuuuture....

Click here to open the Big Board (it’s in Google Sheets)

The 3-Year Running NBA Big Board is an idea that’s floated around in my head for a couple of years now. Too often have I heard some bozo preaching about how awful this 2024 NBA Draft is, especially in comparison to the golden group that we got in 2023. What does it really mean to be a “weak” draft class though? Conversely, what does it mean to be a “strong” draft class? And how could we ever hope to classify draft classes on a scale of strength if we never spend the time to actually compare and contrast the classes?

Welcome to what is sure to be the future of NBA scouting!!

My goal with this 3-Year Running Big Board is to track the “stock price” of prospects across multiple draft classes, and to track the progression of the classes throughout the full draft cycle. This board will feature three years of draft prospects, ranked by several draft resources (both professional and amateur) around the same time of year. For instance, I grabbed versions of the No Ceilings composite board from 12/7/2021, 12/20/2022, and 12/15/2023. This allows me to gauge their opinions on players from the 2022, 2023, and 2024 NBA Draft cycles all within the month of December. As we go throughout the year, we will see changes across all three classes - the 2022 and 2023 classes will serve as our training set, a known sequence of changes that we will see alongside the live updates for 2024.

Open the Big Board in Google Sheets

Not only can we track the differences in the 2022, 2023, and 2024 draft classes, but with this time-based analysis, we can analyze differences in the draft cycles themselves. Is there more variance from month-to-month this year than in ‘22 and ‘23? Do we see more prospects from outside the RSCI Top 100 stake their claim as NBA players? How long does it take to come to a consensus regarding the top few picks, or does that consensus ever even arrive? It is far too easy to get stuck in the scope of a single moment, but by looking back a couple of years we can remind ourselves that we aren’t simply ranking players 1-60. We are projecting and predicting the career outcomes of prospects, and we all know not every #1 pick is built the same. Through this exercise we can start to more objectively determine the strength or weakness of a draft class, and move into a more granular analysis grouping prospects based on position, skillset, size, pedigree and more.

Quick preview of the Top 30

Some legalese:

• See the Board Metadata tab to reference all the individual Big Boards compiled for this exercise. Big time shoutout to all of you great folks for putting out such great publicly available rankings!

• Recruit ranking is based off of RSCI Top 100 composite scores; if unavailable, I manually plugged in the 247 Composite score. NR = Not Ranked, INTL = International-based, JUCO = Junior College, PRO = US-based pro player

• For this version, I only grabbed Top 30’s due to limited availability (and frankly limited credibility) this early in the draft cycle. Later in, I’ll pull Top 45’s and eventually Top 60’s

• Boards range from 11/5 - 12/20
  

Click 4 da Big Board (still in Google Sheets!!)