With the exception of the #7 pick used on Jason Williams (which begat Mike Bibby), all you hope for with later picks is that you get a productive NBA player. In that respect, Petrie’s hits include Williams, Corliss, Peja, Hedo, Wallace, Martin and Garcia, while his misses include Abdul-Wahad (though some would call that a wash) and Douby. Too soon to call on Hawes and Thompson. Dickau was chosen by someone else (Hawks?), as that pick was not ours to keep.

So the tally is 7-2, with two TBD. Not bad when your average draft slot is 17.

A fair comparison, I think.

‘95 – Travis Best (23)
’96 – Erick Dampier (10)
’97 – Austin Croshere (12)
’98 – Al Harrington (25)
’99 – Vonteego Cummings (26)
’00 – Primoz Brezec (27)
’01 – None
’02 – Fred Jones (14)
’03 – None
’04-’07 – Turned over to Larry Bird
’08 – Danilo Gallinari (6)

With an average slot of 18, Walsh went 5-2, with Gallinari still TBD. To be fair, though, if you consider Best and Fred Jones successes, then you probably have to call Abdul-Wahad a success, which would make GP 8-1.

You can also use Kevin McHale for this exercise (how has he lasted 13 years?!?), but be sure to include that he made the following draft day trades: Traded Ray Allen for Stephon Marbury, Brandon Roy for Randy Foye, and O.J. Mayo for Kevin Love. Yikes.

But compare GP’s record to other GMs. He may (or may not) be the best, but I would be surprised if he isn’t in the Top 10 at the worst. I have no idea how to compare this. Maybe those stat geeks at 82games.com can do it. For the Kings and the Kings system he has done remarkably well. Best of all, he has picked guys that surprised everyone. I love NBA Draft night and the scramble by the producers to find footage and the announcers who try to have some comment about a guy who’s name they don’t even know how to pronounce.

Really see the relevance of this post. It’s a ton of interesting information to be sure, but what exactly is the context for the content? Talent evaluation, and for that matter any kind of thorough informational analysis, can’t be done in a vacuum. I could dedicate an entire blog to things I can’t do, but I don’t really see me documenting my inability to play the bassoon or speak Cantonese as being particularly constructive vs. me acknowledging my inability to organize and its potential effects on workplace productivity. Is there a message I’m missing beyond “these are people Petrie missed out on, let’s hope he doesn’t do it again.” And if the point is in regards to not picking Power Forwards remember we had one of the league’s best on our roster for much of the above documented time, sort of negating the need to draft another…

It’s a bit tough to compare who has done the best in drafting, because a lot of the players drafted don’t stay long with their draft teams or enjoy some or most of their success with different teams. That’s certainly true of the Kings list.

It’s also tough to compare based on the differences in draft position. Someone knocked McHale, but he drafted Garnett, Ray Allen, Brandon Roy, Al Jefferson, etc., albeit generally with high picks, so his record as a drafter is not too bad.

There’s also draft day trades to muck up the mix. The Bucks, for example, drafted Nowitzki, then dealt him to the Mavericks for Robert Traylor.

At a quick glance Cleveland, Utah, Phoenix and the Spurs are some teams that seem to have done a good job in the draft in the period Petrie has been with the Kings. I am sure there are some others.

The Kings have drafted on average in the 17th position since Petrie has been here.

Here’s the players who have been drafted 17th each year:

• 1995: Bob Sura.
• 1996: Jermaine O’Neal.
• 1997: Johnny Taylor.
• 1998: Rasho Nesterovic.
• 1999: Carl Bowdler.
• 2000: Desmond Mason.
• 2001: Michael Bradley.
• 2002: Juan Dixon.
• 2003: Zarko Cabarkapa.
• 2004: Josh Smith.
• 2005: Danny Granger.
• 2006: Shawne Williams.
• 2007: Sean Williams.
• 2008: Roy Hibbert.

The Kings had better picks than 17th in 1995-98 and 2000 as well as 2007-2008. They had worse picks in 2001-02 and 2004-06.

If you took Petrie’s “Dream Team” with all those players in their prime, that’s probably a one and done playoff team, which is pretty rock solid considering where he drafted. White Chocolate, Speed, Peja, Hedo and Hawes could the ball in the basket with anyone, and you’d have Cisco, Williamson, JT, and Crash off the bench; that’s an awesome bench.

Actually this conversation started with a discussion Pookey started in the Ugh thread that Section jumped in on.

As Pookey said there: “At some point, Petrie has to be the most responsible, and the Maloof’s sharing the responsbility, of how this roster is put together.”

What is interesting about this draft exercise is that early on, when Petrie and the Kings were on the up escalator, the draft picks outside of Peja were used as trade bait in building the team to its best levels or keeping it there. Or, when we got too good, they were just allowed to walk (Wallace).

Now we have five straight drafts of players who are still on the team and an 8-24 team.

I think you can argue at one point Petrie’s skill was in using the combination of tools at his disposal – draft, free agency and particularly trades – to build a compelling roster.

But he seems to have lost his touch. The Kings are a .400 ballclub in the past 2 1/2 years and worst than that this season, In addition, their record has gotten worse in six of the past seven years, with only Theus’ first season reversing that trend.

Petrie made some brilliant moves in turning this ballclub into a top-flight contender. He hasn’t delivered the same kind of performance in recent years.

GP had 12 first round picks of which I say 9 were hits: Corliss, Peja, J-Will, Hedo, Wallace, Martin, Cisco, Spence and JT. That’s a 75% hit rate.

Now for the teams picking behind us. I used your list of hits and for the total picks I used (30 – Kings draft #) to give the total 1st round picks after GP’s pick. I’m giving those teams the 2nd rounders(Redd, Boozer, Landry(?)) for free. It works out to 22 hits on 156 picks for 14% hit rate.

The other thing to keep in mind here is that the teams drafting behind us are usually teams that are better than us and thus probably have a higher percentage of quality GMs than the teams drafting before us. For instance, the Spurs drafted behind us often, but the Clippers didn’t. So GP’s hit rate is very good compared to the cream of the league.

Now I realize you didn’t list all the hits, so let’s triple their hits to account for this. Now it’s 66 on 156 for a 42% hit rate. GP still looks pretty good.

I am still mulling this question of how to evaluate the drafting ability of a franchise or even the success of a single pick. I read the Barzilai article, Assessing the Relative Value of Draft Position in the NBA Draft, at 82games.com for some hints.

One of the four criteria used is Win Shares, and it is the easiest to access through the draft boards at BasketballReference.com. Here’s the link to the 2004 draft.

It seems to me that if you can come up with a stat that fairly evaluates the career achievements of a player, then you can compare how teams did in a particular draft. In other words, if Kevin Martin is drafted 26th in 2004 and stats show him to be the fourth best player in that draft, that’s obviously a great draft pick. On the other hand, if Jason Williams is No. 8 pick but doesn’t achieve at least the 8th best stats of the players selected in his draft, then that goes down as a miss.

This also gives you a potential tool to evaluate the work of somone like Petrie.

Barzilai uses four stats over three time frames as part of his study:

• PER-Minutes (Season PER*Season Minutes)
• Player Wins
• Win Shares
• Estimated Salary

As best I can tell, you can get all but Player Wins in the individual player profiles at Basketball Reference that are link to in their draft summaries, although PER and minutes played are reported separately and you would have to do that calculation.

Anyway, just looking at the 2004 draft and just looking at Career Win Shares, here are the top players and the spot they were drafted at (stats include this season’s games):
1. Dwight Howard, 44.1 win shares (1st pick).
2. Andre Iguodala, 34.1 (9th).
3. Luol Deng, 26.7 (7th).
4. Kevin Martin, 25.4 (26th).
5. Ben Gordon, 24.9 (3rd).
6. Andris Biedrins, 23.4 (11th).
7. Josh Childress, 23.1 (6th).
8. Al Jefferson, 22.9 (15th).
9. Devin Harris, 22.8 (5th).
10. Emeka Okafur, 21.6 (2nd).
11. Jameer Nelson, 21.1 (20th).
12. Chris Duhon, 19.3 (38th).
13. Anderson Varejao, 17.8 (30th).
14. Josh Smith, 17.3 (17th).
15. Delonte West, 15.8 (24th).
16. Trevor Ariza, 11.3 (43rd).
17. J.R. Smith, 11.0 (18th).
18. Tony Allen, 10.3 (25th).
19. Sasha Vujacic, 9.2 (27th).
20. Beno Udrih, 8.3 (28th).

Hollinger establishes a PER of 15 as a league-average performance, yet only three of Petrie’s draft picks have a lifetime PER above 15: Martin (18.2), Peja (17.9) and Wallace (17.5). Hedo is at 15 even; Grant and Wiliamson are at 14.9 and Jason Williams at 14.4.

So basically you have three above-average picks and the rest are average or below-average players with a just-below average draft position.

How many guys were better than the guy GP took in compared to where he took them? I used 1st round picks only, as 2nd rounders are crap shoots that everyone passed on at least once.

1994 – Brian Grant (7th). Players on a par or better than Grant from that draft: Glenn Robinson, Jason Kidd, Donyell Marshall, Juwan Howard, Eddie Jones, Jalen Rose (total 6 players). End result: This was a fair value pick, with a side bar that Grant was not projected to go this high.

1995 – Corliss Williamson (13th) – Joe Smith, Antonio MycDyess, Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, Kevin Garnett, Kurt Thomas, Michael Finley (7 players). Throw in Damon Stoudamire and Brent Barry if you like; Corliss at #13 was still an excellent pick.

1996 – Peja Stojakovic (14th) – Allen Iverson, Marcus Camby, Ray Allen, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Zydrunas Ilgauskas (6 players). Add Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Jermaine O’Neal and Derek Fisher if you like. Peja at #14 was and excellent pick.

1997 – Olivier Saint-Jean (Tariq Abdul-Wahad) – Tim Duncan, Keith Van Horn, Chauncey Billups, Antonio Daniels, Tony Battie, Ron Mercer, Tim Thomas, Adonal Foyle, Tracy McGrady, Austin Croshere, Derek Anderson, Maurice Taylor, Brevin Knight, Scot Pollard, Jacque Vaughn (15 players – italics denote players chosen after the #11 pick). This was a bad pick.

1998 – Jason Williams (7th) – Mike Bibby, Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter, Larry Hughes, Dirk Nowitzki, Paul Pierce, Al Harrington (7 players). Without making the argument that Williams helped re-vitalize a franchise and later fetched Mike Bibby in trade, this is a fair value pick.

1999 – No pick.

2000 – Hedo Turkoglu (16th) – Kenyon Martin, Mike Miller, Quentin Richardson (3 players). Even if you throw in Jamal Crawford, Joel Przybilla, Desmond Mason and Morris Peterson, this was an excellent pick.

2001 – Gerald Wallace (26th) – Tyson Chandler, Pau Gasol, Jason Richardson, Joe Johnson, Richard Jefferson, Tony Parker (6 players). Add Shane Battier, Zach Randolph and Samuel Dalembert if you like. This was an excellent pick.

2002 – No pick (The selection of Dan Dickau at #28 was made by Atlanta).

2003 – No pick.

2004 – Kevin Martin (26th) – Dwight Howard, Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, Devin Harris, Luol Deng, Andre Iguodala, Andris Biedrins, Al Jefferson, Josh Smith, Jameer Nelson (10 players). An excellent pick.

I’m hesitant to go beyond this point, as many of the 2004 players (Iguodala, Biedrins, Smith, Nelson) really blossomed last year. As we move beyond this point, it we may overlook some players that have not yet broken out. But since we’re comparing apples with apples, let’s move ahead.

2005 – Francisco Garcia (23rd) – Andrew Bogut, Marvin Williams, Deron Williams, Chris Paul, Raymond Felton, Martell Webster, Charlie Villanueva, Andrew Bynum, Rashad McCants, Danny Granger, Hakim Warrick, Jason Maxiell, David Lee Linas Kleiza (14 players). Throw in Ike Diogu, Nate Robinson and Luther Head if you like. This is not quite and excellent pick, but it is a little better than fair value. But until Garcia develops further, let’s call it fair value.

2006 – Quincy Douby (19th) – There are about 14 players delivering more than Douby from this draft, but only a couple that are delivering less (that is, they are not in the league). Bottom line, this is a bad pick if Douby never develops.

By my count, I come up with 5 excellent picks, 3 fair value picks, and two bad picks, with 2 to be determined. When I look at the number of top 5, top 10 and 1st round picks that never make it in the NBA, I would think that 5/3/2 would be considered an excellent track record among NBA GM’s.

There seems to be an awful lot of non-analysis going on in this thread.

I can’t tell if it’s:

• Trying to use statistics to back up pre-existing opinions,
• Playing Devil’s Advocate, for the sake of stirring up controversy (as pookey suggested),
• Continuously changing opinions based on anecdotal data from small sample sizes, or
• Trying to work through some ideas publicly before they’re thought out entirely.

Or perhaps I’m just missing something.

There’s some very interesting questions posed here and there, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of organization of ideas in working through these questions (hat tip to Section in this regard, as he has done an admirable job answering almost every question put to him).

This is a great topic, but it seems as though many arguments are formed/changed with every piece of information (or new information is added with little to no explanation as to its purpose), which points to quick judgments rather than thought out ideas. As I pointed out in my reply to Section above, context has a lot to do with any data used (as the saying goes, “Statistics don’t lie, but lairs use statistics”).

In the future, I think it would benefit everyone to work through the data before forming arguments/opinions, so that a more informed hypothesis can be made, and we could cut down on redundant disputes.

To be clear, this is just my 2 cents, and was not intended/aimed to attack/insult anyone. I hope it’s not taken that way.

Petrie likes to pick up guys who were drafted early, but become available: think Webber, Bibby, Shareef, Shelden and maybe there are others. It might be a clue as to his next moves as he tries to rescue this situation.

GP has had an excellent run in drafts for the Kings.

Since coolcat has provided us a list of the better players picked after Kings’ selections, I’ll provide the list of worse players that have come before Kings’ picks as a counterpoint (I’m just eyeballing the value of these players’ careers in opposition to the Kings selection, please feel free to disagree with my assessments):

• (Corliss Willamson): Bryant Reeves, Shawn Respert, Ed O’Bannon, Gary Trent, Cherokee Parks

• 1996 (Peja Stojakovic): Lorenzen Wright, Kerry Kittles, Samaki Walker, Todd Fuller, Vitaly Potapenko

• 1997 (Tariq Abdul-Wahad): No one worse

• 1998 (Jason Williams): Michael Olowokandi, Raef LaFrentz, Robert Traylor

• 1999 No first round pick

• 2000 (Hedo Turkoglu): Stromile Swift, Darius Miles, Marcus Fizer, DerMarr Johnson, Chris Mihm, Keyon Dooling, Jerome Moiso, Etan Thomas, Courtney Alexander, Mateen Cleaves, Jason Collier

• 2001 (Gerald Wallace): Kwame Brown, Eddy Curry, Eddie Griffin, DeSagana Diop, Rodney White, Kedrick Brown, Vladimir Radmanovic, Steven Hunter, Kirk Haston, Michael Bradley, Jason Collins, Brendan Haywood, Joe Forte, Jeryl Sasser, Brandon Armstrong, Raul Lopez

• 2002 No first round pick

• 2003 No first-round pick.

• 2004 (Kevin Martin): Shaun Livingston, Josh Childress, Rafael Araujo, Luke Jackson, Robert Swift, Sebastian Telfair, Kris Humphries, Kirk Snyder, J.R. Smith, Dorell Wright, Jameer Nelson, Pavel Podkolzin, Viktor Khryapa, Sergei Monia, Delonte West, Tony Allen

• 2005 (Francisco Garcia): Fran Vasquez, Sean May, Antoine Wright, Gerald Green, Julius Hodge

• 2006: (Quincy Douby): Patrick O’Bryant (but barely), Oleksiy Pecherov (?)

So, of the 145 players picked before Kings first-round selections from 1995-2006, about 60 (or 41%) are worse than the (former) Kings selected behind them. By comparison, coolcat has identified 9 players better than the (former) Kings selected ahead of them (excluding those picked in the second round, since everyone passed on them once and the 2007 and 2008 players, whose careers are too young to call). Pretty good for a GM with an average draft position of 17, only two spots from the middle of the pack.

GP has yet to draft us a superstar. Will he do it with a projected top-five pick this year? Who knows, but I trust his ability to do so as much as any GM in the NBA.

for obvious reasons.

I’m sure the guy who drafted Boozer would like to see that pick tallied in judging HIS drafting ability.

Is the Sacramento Kings 1993-94 Roster the team Petrie inherited?