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It’s fun to debate who the top NBA players drafted in the 2010s are. But who are the best draft prospects of the last decade?
A fun game that’s thrown around from time to time on NBA Draft Twitter is to debate the merits of the top prospects of the last few years against each other. Is Zion Williamson the best prospect ever? Who would you rather build around, Luka Doncic or Karl-Anthony Towns? How would you rank Lonzo Ball, Ben Simmons and Doncic as passers?
Keeping a catalog of your rankings is very important for keeping perspective from year to year. Certain drafts are stronger than others, and it’s important to consider how well say, the top tier of prospects in 2013 stack up to Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist in 2012. The draft can spit out Luka Doncic at pick No. 3 one year and Otto Porter Jr. another, and valuing prospects from the current year against how you remember prospects from past years is valuable information for determining projected outcomes.
Now, hindsight bias is a thing, and this exercise isn’t infallible. Eight years out, it is difficult to remember that there once wasn’t a consensus that Giannis Antetokounmpo would go in the first round because projecting him from the Greek second division to the NBA at age 18 was nearly impossible. Just because he hit doesn’t make him one of the top prospects of the last decade; just like Kawhi Leonard growing skills like rabbits reproduce doesn’t mean that he should have gone No. 1 overall. The name of the game in the draft isn’t figuring out who is going to be the best NBA player five years out; that’s nearly impossible, as proven nearly every year. It’s instead trying to determine who has the best chance of becoming a star and improving your team when they get to the NBA level.
Since the 2020 NBA Draft might be the weakest in recent memory, it might be fun to remember the good times; when there were several prospects better than the Anthony Edwards/LaMelo Ball choice looming for whoever wins the 2020 NBA Draft lottery, whenever that occurs. So to take a break from the grind of trying to parse a bad draft class, let’s expand that classic Draft Twitter question: What would a 30-pick first round of draft picks from all of the 2010s’ classes look like?
Remember, for this exercise, we’re remembering these players as prospects, and not necessarily considering their NBA outcomes. Outcomes can vary wildly by which team a player is drafted by, and not every player is going to be the same guy if he lands on two different teams. So instead of considering where these guys ended up, we’re considering them as they were at the time of the draft. In these rankings, Anthony Davis hasn’t played a minute for the New Orleans Pelicans; Joel Embiid is still injured with his first navicular fracture; and Giannis is still a total unknown projected to go in the middle of the least top-heavy draft of the decade, and therefore isn’t included on this list.