WHO WILL IT BE?
Warriors are keeping their options open with top-5 NBA draft pick: ‘The best player is not obvious’
Sometimes Warriors head coach Steve Kerr laughs when he reads articles grading selections of past NBA drafts.
“It’s a tough position to be in to have to write about these guys and grade teams when nobody really knows but, after the fact, it’s sort of hilarious,” Kerr said. “Pascal Siakam going 27th and people complaining about the Raptors not knowing what they were doing, because so-and-so was available. Are you nuts? If you did that redraft, he’d be top-five.”
The NBA draft lottery is scheduled for May 19, and the Warriors are poised to select no later than fifth. However, they know the best player in the draft could end up being selected much later. With that in mind, the Warriors are taking a deep look at prospects, going beyond the players most often discussed at the top of the draft.
As Kerr, general manager Bob Myers and the rest of the Warriors’ front office spend the hiatus watching film and scouting prospects, their final draft board for their first-round pick is expected to be whittled down to about 15 players by draft night.
Those 15 players will be separated by tier: roughly broken up by
those worthy of a top-five selection, top-10 selection and in the middle of the first round. The tiers reflect not only how the Warriors value each player, but also where they believe they can be selected.
“You remind yourself that Kawhi Leonard went 15th,” Kerr, who has enjoyed watching film of prospects in his San Diego home while the NBA season has been suspended, said in a phone interview. “You can’t limit yourself to the five or six guys you think are clearcut the best because the chances are overwhelming that those five or six guys are not going to be the best.”
With a league-worst record of 15-50 at the time the NBA postponed play on March 11 after a player tested positive for the coronavirus, the Warriors will enter the draft lottery with a 14% chance to land the No. 1 pick, a 13.4% chance at the No. 2 pick, a 12.7% chance at the No. 3 pick, a 12% chance at the No. 4 pick and a 47.9% chance at the No. 5 pick.
Picking that high would position the Warriors to select one of the draft’s widely-considered top prospects such as Georgia guard Anthony Edwards, former Memphis center James Wiseman, point guard LaMelo Ball, who spent last season playing for the Illawarra Hawks of Australia’s National Basketball League, and forward Deni Avdija of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Edwards has long been atop many big boards. At 6-foot-3, 225 pounds, the 18-year-old Edwards projects as a multi-tool defender who can finish at the basket and handle the ball as a secondary playmaker. There are questions about his motor and efficiency, but his ceiling is that of an AllStar level player.
However, two draft experts have recently moved Ball ahead of Edwards, citing his transcendent passing and ability to play uptempo. ESPN’s draft analyst Mike Schmitz said recently that he understands the logic of taking Edwards or Wiseman, but thinks the Warriors should select Ball if they get the first pick.
“I think he’s the most talented prospect in the draft,” Schmitz told “SportsCenter’s” Scott Van Pelt last week. “I’d be very interested to see his fit in that style. This is a team that likes to get up and down, they like to shoot 3s, they like to play off of instincts.”
The Athletic’s Sam Vecenie also moved Ball up to the top spot on his board, supplanting Edwards.
“There was no single player in this draft class that consistently left me in awe as much as Ball,” Vecenie wrote. “If Ball reaches his ceiling, he has the most potential to be an absolute difference-maker.”
Beyond Edwards, Ball, Wiseman and Avdija, other prospects the Warriors are considering include Auburn forward Isaac Okoro, French point guard Killian Hayes, USC center Onyeka Okongwu, Iowa State guard Tyrese Haliburton, Dayton forward Obi Toppin — the Wooden Award winner — and guard R.J. Hampton, who, like Ball, played last season in Australia.
Without a blue-chip prospect such as Zion Williamson or Luka Doncic, scouts consider 2020 a needsbased draft. The challenge for the Warriors is projecting how prospects fit and develop in their system.
“You just try to picture these players in the modern NBA and with our team,” Kerr said. “And that’s the trick, is to figure out which guys would make the biggest impact on our team and what we need.”
That will be a challenge due to the cancelation of the men’s college basketball tournament, the possible cancelation of the NBA draft combine — which is scheduled to start in Chicago on May 21 — and the fact that several of the draft’s top prospects are underclassmen who have played less than one full season of college basketball.
Instead, coaches and scouts are scouring the available film and reaching out to whatever connections they may have — including college coaches — to find out more about each prospect’s strengths, weaknesses and personality.
That information will go into a database and be discussed on weekly calls between the coaching staff and scouting department, and help determine the organization’s strategy — and ultimate target — on draft night. The Warriors could keep their pick and take one of the top-ranked players, or trade back in the draft and accumulate more helpful pieces. Either way, the Warriors won’t let mock drafts and big boards sway them.
All it takes is a look at past drafts to know the best player is not always the one with the most hype. After all, Leonard was taken with the 15th pick in 2011, Giannis Antetokounmpo went 15th in 2013 and cornerstones like Donovan Mitchell and Bam Adebayo weren’t selected until the late lottery in 2017.
“It’s tricky because on the one hand you want to just take the best player,” Kerr said. “On the other hand, most drafts these days … it seems like the best player is not obvious.”