Hornets Draft Grades

I've been meaning to do this post for a while, and I've finally crunched the numbers enough that I think I can do it justice. I've seen a lot of complaints about the Hornets drafting bad second rounders over the last few years - but the second round of the draft is a real crapshoot, so I set out to discover if the Hornets were really as bad as advertised at selecting talent in the Draft. While I was at it, I figured I'd cover their drafting for both the Second and First Rounds.

Now, I'm a little limited in the data I personally have on my computer(don't have last years stats yet, or anything before 1994), so I'm going to cut off my evaluation of players after 2005. That's probably fair anyways because few players do anything their rookie year, so they can have a year to try to develop into something before I classify them. Using what data I had, I developed a cheap and easy method of evaluating the players taken in the drafts from 1994-2005. I determined an overall ranking based loosely on the Wages of Wins Win Score, and then applied that to the number of minutes the player played to figure out how much they've produced over the years. Then I jammed those numbers into a simple Grade ranking. Below is what each grade means, and give an example player the Hornets drafted.

N/A - the player never played in the NBA. (Tim Pickett, Andrew Betts)
F - The player was terrible. Either played some and sucked, or really didn't play. (Kirk Haston)
D - A substitute - probably in the rotation, but 7th or 8th man.(Lee Nailon)
C - A marginal starter, solid backup.(Ricky Davis, Tony Delk)
B - A starter. (David West, Jamaal Magloire, Baron lands here, but only just misses an A)
A - A star.(Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul)

Yes - you do see Kobe listed there. He was the Hornets 13th pick in the '96 and was traded for Vlade Divac. I give the Hornets credit for selecting him, because their scouts did have to identify his talent. And even if I was just giving the Hornets credit for Vlade, Divac actually has a score on the line between an A- and a B+ for his career.

So, now that I knew the value of each pick the Hornets have made over the eleven year span between '94 and 2005, I evaluated the other players taken at each spot and averaged their scores. To illustrate - over those 11 years, those players taken 1st overall averaged a B-. 5 A's(Tim Duncan, Elton Brand, Yao Ming, Lebron James,and Dwight Howard.), 1 B (Allen Iverson), 3 C's (Glenn Robinson, Joe Smith, and Kenyon Martin) 1 D(Kwame Brown), and 1 F(Michael Olowokandi).

So - combining it all, How have the Hornets done? I think they've done well, but take a look and form your own opinions. And comment, if you feel like it:

Hornets Pick	Player Selected	Player Rating	Average Result
3rd	Baron Davis	B+	C+
4th	Chris Paul	A	C
13th	Kobe Bryant	A	C
16th	Tony Delk	C	D
16th	Kirk Haston	F	D
18th	David West	B	D
18th	JR Smith	D	D
19th	Jamaal Magloire	B-	D-
21st	Ricky Davis	C+	D
22nd	George Zidek	F	D-
38th	Darrin Hancock	D-	F
40th	Brandon Bass	F	F
43rd	Lee Nailon	D	D-
44th	Malik Rose	D+	F-
44th	Tim Pickett	N/A	F-
48th	James Lang	N/A	F
50th	Andrew Betts	N/A	F

[Update] I've since added another ten years worth of data to my PC - so I now have an overall rating for all picks back to 1984. I've updated the Average Result column in the table above to reflect the new rankings - though I haven't yet added in all the rest of the Hornets picks.