DURING THE LATE winter of 2013, an 18-year-old curio named Giannis Antetokounmpo was turning heads in Greece's second-tier professional league. Though he was averaging fewer than 10 points per game, Antetokounmpo's physical profile, body control and vision screamed "modern-day NBA."
Only a handful of front-office executives from the NBA had witnessed Antetokounmpo in person, and only the Atlanta Hawks had brought him into their facility. Most of the league had relied on video, as well as intelligence from scouts and various contacts in the world of European basketball, for their information. What multiple front offices heard gave them great pause about the prospect.
An executive from one team that passed on Antetokounmpo in the June draft did so because the word was that the teenager was soft. For all the raw talent and upside, Antetokounmpo, who spoke no English and had limited exposure to the world outside of Greek basketball, couldn't survive in the NBA. The intel also warned that Antetokounmpo's family could be an impediment: The immigration status of his parents and brothers was thorny, and the task of getting them into the United States could present complications for a team that drafts him. Being alone in a strange city without his family, the thinking went, Antetokounmpo would struggle personally.
The Milwaukee Bucks selected Antetokounmpo in the 2013 draft with the 15th pick, one slot ahead of the Hawks, who were devastated. After a steady development period during his first few years in the league, Antetokounmpo has blossomed into a five-time All-Star, two-time MVP and NBA champion before his 27th birthday.
So far as Antetokounmpo's potentially problematic family, his filial piety and brotherly love have been defining characteristics of his success. Far from being a distraction, Antetokounmpo's devotion to his kin has been a main driver of his renowned work ethic. To the extent it informed the ultimate decision of any of the 14 teams that drafted ahead of the Bucks, the intel was a germ.
Intelligence is merely one ingredient that goes into the talent evaluation of NBA draft prospects. Yet despite extraordinary advancements in so many areas and exponential front-office growth to match, the NBA collectively is no better at projecting an elite draft prospect than it was 40 years ago.
In a landscape where the NBA's brightest minds have pushed the boundaries of the frontier, the NBA draft remains the most stubborn line of resistance. But there's one team that believes it might know something the rest of the league doesn't.
THIS SPRING'S FINALS offer an object lesson in the power of the annual draft. The Boston Celtics' starting five featured four first-round picks between 2014 and 2018. The Golden State Warriors transformed from a backwater to glam franchise by drafting Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. Younger draftees Jordan Poole and Kevon Looney also proved indispensable in the Warriors' title run.
In contrast, the failure of the Sacramento Kings and Orlando Magic to find franchise players despite drafting repeatedly near the top of the lottery have consigned them to chronic mediocrity.
One team that's had mixed results in recent years -- like most NBA teams -- is the Phoenix Suns. Unlike most NBA teams, the Suns have determined that the best way to value the NBA draft might be to not value it at all.
In a league where teams spend millions of dollars and employ an ever-growing number of scouts in a year-round pursuit to nail the June draft, the Suns, under the current leadership of general manager James Jones, are taking the inverse approach.
Phoenix's tack is as unconventional as it is anti-establishment: Not only are the Suns bucking a pronounced league trend by divesting from the Draft Industrial Complex, they're also espousing a view in the information age that less of it is better.
Michael Lopez, now the director of football data and analytics for the National Football League, examined the historic performance of the NBA at drafting in a 2017 study. Then an assistant professor at Skidmore College who had earned his Ph.D. in biostatistics from Brown University, he found that the NBA didn't improve at all between 1980 and 2017.
The flatline isn't monocausal -- there are a host of factors that range from youth to various intangibles. The most common response offered speaks to the youth of most draftees.
Both successful and unsuccessful teams rely on scouting, workouts, interviews, physical measurements, medical reports and analytics. Over the past few decades, these processes have advanced considerably. Video platforms enable a scout to watch the most granular elements of a prospect's game with the touch of a button. More sophisticated technology allows team physicians and performance specialists to spot red flags that might compromise a player's health. Psychologists assess a teenager's competitive makeup. Sophisticated statistical modeling projects how the production of a collegian or international player might translate to the NBA.
Multiple other front-office executives charged with the unenviable task of projection say confirmation bias is the most derailing factor. A scout may fall in love with a prospect in November after watching him at a college tournament and author a report to that effect. Then, as the basketball operations person now vested in that prospect's continued maturation, he continues to champion the player, even as countervailing evidence emerges that exposes the player's vulnerabilities. Like a Texas Hold 'em player who is pot-committed, the scout continues to ride hope, even with the probabilities turned.
Beyond the on-court factors, execs and scouts say it's harder than ever to project the human dynamics. Will a teenager asked to move thousands of miles from home have the life skills to manage the demands of an inordinately demanding job? How will millions of dollars affect that process? Do they have the mental and emotional capacity to buy-in to a new brand of basketball after years of dominating at every level?
Then there's the smallest of sample-size theater. James Wiseman played all of 69 minutes at Memphis, while Darius Garland played five games at Vanderbilt. Famously, Kyrie Irving played only 11 games at Duke. Top 2022 prospect Shaedon Sharpe didn't play a single game this season for Kentucky.
One executive said he's been burned by an overly cautious medical staff who raised red flags that dissuaded him from selecting a first-round prospect. Many feel that workouts, more controlled by agents than ever, are overvalued, as is performance in the NCAA tournament (see Williams, Derrick and Flynn, Jonny). Combine results can be tantalizing, though scouts and execs feel as if the league has made a proper correction on a traditional fetish -- "athleticism." Yet at the same time, some say the swing toward "basketball IQ" has moved so dramatically in the past few years, that teams might look up to find that they don't have the necessary shot creation to contend.
In 1992, 53 of the 54 selections chosen in the NBA draft were college players. In 2020, 12 of the 60 picks didn't play Division I basketball. In 2021, that number was 10. Today, teams must measure college freshmen against 19-year-olds who opted for the G-League or pro ball in Australia, to say nothing of international prospects from Africa, South America and the lower professional leagues of Europe.
All these factors fit neatly under a single rubric: No matter how many tools and how much expertise, it's damn near impossible to predict the future.
N'FALY DANTE HAS the paint on lockdown. The 7-foot center for the University of Oregon has claimed as a personal imperative this afternoon to deny any eager Oregon State opponent proximity to the basket. In this Pac-12 tournament game, he'll block five shots in 28 minutes and affect a half dozen more, the Beavers all but giving up trying to penetrate, lest they encounter Dante in his circle of hell in the key.
Out of high school, Dante was a five-star recruit, one of the best young centers in the world who was recruited by a number of big-name programs, including Kentucky. Had he not suffered knee and ACL injuries in 2020, Dante might be a projected first-round prospect.
To the naked eye -- and even an informed basketball fan -- Dante appears dominant. But Danny Gomez, 34, and Drew Mastin, then 24, who are here scouting the Pac-12 and several other conference tournaments in Las Vegas this week for the Phoenix Suns, aren't impressed. It's early on a Wednesday afternoon at T-Mobile Arena, and scouts outnumber the fans in this section behind the Oregon State basket for this not-so-anticipated matchup between the No. 5 and No. 12 seeds.
"Oregon State doesn't really have any pull-up jump shooters," Gomez says. "It's easy for Dante to be deep defensively. Very little we'll see today will tell us how well he'd defend the NBA pick-and-roll game."
Much of Gomez and Mastin's week will be spent observing imperfect college players such as Dante in an effort to find a Nikola Jokic, Draymond Green, Khris Middleton, Fred VanVleet or Jalen Brunson. Though the Suns don't currently own a pick in Thursday's draft, it's fairly easy for a team to buy into the second round if they stumble upon a prospect who intrigues them. That's why Gomez and Mastin are here -- to determine whether Dante has recovered enough of the uncommon agility he displayed prior to the injury to qualify as one of those unvarnished gems.
After Gomez and Mastin finish their work at the Pac-12 tournament, they ride 2 miles east on Tropicana Avenue to UNLV's Thomas & Mack Center for the Mountain West Conference tournament. One of the MWC players they're watching most closely is David Roddy, a projected second-rounder. A thick, 6-foot-5 fireplug with solid ball skills and a 64.5 true shooting percentage, the conference player of the year is catnip for any evaluator who is determined to find the next undervalued and positionless unicorn.
Yet as they watch Colorado State face Utah State the next afternoon, the confounding task of talent evaluation is a persistent theme. Just as measuring Dante against one of college basketball's worst teams provides little reliable insight, gleaning much from Roddy on Thursday proves similarly impossible. He's less impactful than his reputed basketball IQ implies he should be despite an efficient 6-for-9 performance from the field. He seems passive against matchups that appear favorable, and though he's clearly a strong individual defender, he seems a half-second slow to react in help situations.
The limitations of watching the Dantes and Roddys of the world play some live basketball, then projecting a 15-year career, is just one reason the scouting operation Gomez and Mastin are part of in Phoenix operates with more skepticism about the draft than those of most NBA teams. While it's still marginally useful to perceive a player's body language in a live game and immerse oneself in the temperature and tone of a game, Gomez and Mastin will leave the arena with a few notes, but no inclination to write up an elaborate report as scouts from many NBA teams would.
The Suns don't have a formal reporting system for Gomez or Mastin to feed after each game they see, or conversation they have with a college coach. Jones prefers that his scouts stay as close to the team in Phoenix as possible. Consequently, Gomez -- the Suns' lead international scout -- will spend far more time over the course of the basketball season in Phoenix than his counterparts in Europe will at their mother ships, if they return at all. Whereas most NBA teams do exhaustive work to draw up their "draft board" ranking dozens of prospects, the Suns have sworn off the practice the past three years.
"Our draft board would be a mockery to other teams," says Zach Amundson, the Suns' senior analyst of personnel and team evaluation. "By the time we were done, we had only five to seven guys on our draft board."
The Suns look with a jaundiced eye on one-and-done prospects. Jones believes that there's precious little to glean from watching an 18-year-old player in his sixth career game during a Thanksgiving tournament in person. He feels that, most days during the regular season, a Suns scout is probably better off observing Monty Williams run practice than watching a college prospect with "raw talent" play against NCAA competition. Jones regards the draft as much as a promotional pageant for the league as a pool of ready-made NBA players who can affect winning right away.
"The draft is one of many channels where we can acquire talent," Jones says. "It's the one we glorify. It's the one that comes with the excitement. And it comes with an advantage -- the ability to get productive players on low salaries, and under contractual control for multiple years. But it's just one vehicle for acquisition. You can only devote so many resources to it, and there's a different value proposition here."
That different value proposition -- less time, expense, brainpower and grunt work -- might pay dividends by simplifying the cumbersome task of appraising hundreds of amateur and international basketball players. But it could also prove to be a quixotic, reductive scheme that leaves the Suns woefully behind the organizations who scour the ends of the earth to mine for draft talent.
AMUNDSON ESTIMATES HE cranked out 200 to 300 reports on NBA prospects after arriving for his first full-time season in Phoenix in 2019. For a 24-year-old eager to make an impression, it made sense to mimic the veterans in the business who pounded away on their laptops at college arenas. In the spring of 2020, Jones approached Amundson and informed him he wouldn't be reading his young scout's exhaustive reports.
Jones told Amundson that he would welcome macro-level conversations about the kinds of prospects the Suns should be monitoring, or even a holistic discussion about a specific college player's career. When Amundson determined a draft-eligible player cleared a threshold to warrant the most serious consideration of the organization, he would then assemble a thorough evaluation making his case.
The presentation, Jones told him, would include an extensive video edit, an evaluation that includes data analysis and an intelligence report. Jones would sit at the head of the conference table during the presentation and make the case against the player, thereby pressing Amundson -- or whichever member of the front office is advocating for the player -- to defend his position. Others in the room would ask questions too.
Jones played four seasons at the University of Miami before the Indiana Pacers selected him with the No. 49 pick of the 2003 draft. During his 14 seasons with the Pacers, Phoenix, Miami and Cleveland, Jones won three NBA championships, all as a teammate of LeBron James, who referred to him as "my favorite player of all time." Jones is one of 31 players in league history to make more than 700 3-pointers at a rate of better than 40%, a skill he got to showcase as a member of the Suns' revolutionary "Seven Seconds or Less" teams.
In many ways, Jones the 22-year-old player is the personification of the prospect Jones the 41-year-old GM values most -- an older player with a refined skill and a mature temperament. In Phoenix, the word "potential" is strictly verboten.
"We're not allowed to talk about 'potential,'" says Ryan Resch, the Suns' vice president of basketball strategy and evaluation. "We say 'capacity' instead of 'potential,' because capacity forces you to recognize what the player can actually do today and what he is capable of doing tomorrow."
Jones, who never played on an NBA team with a losing record, harbors an ideological opposition to the notion of a rebuild, which he finds corrosive to an organization and a disservice to fans.
"You're either trying to win, or you're not trying to win," Jones says. "If you're not trying to win, you can say what you want, but you're trying to lose. You can say, 'Well, let's go slow and win later,' but there are too many things between now and later. I'm trying to win now and win later. Players know every day in the league brings them one day closer to the end of their careers, and I can't waste their days."
"The draft is one of many channels where we can acquire talent. It's the one we glorify. It's the one that comes with the excitement. And it comes with an advantage -- the ability to get productive players on low salaries, and under contractual control for multiple years. But it's just one vehicle for acquisition." Suns GM James Jones
Jones and his staff insist they're interested in "players, not prospects." The Suns say they apply the same criteria used to determine the value of a prospective free agent to the draft. If the player can contribute immediately, and if his skill set can fill an explicit role in Williams' system for the upcoming season, he's worth considering. If neither of those measures can be met, he's not for Phoenix.
Over the past decade, NBA front offices have undergone a movement of professionalization. The Oklahoma City Thunder epitomize this pivot away from old-world scouting and toward technocracy. The Thunder are renowned for their massive database that includes terabytes of information on virtually every basketball prospect in the past two decades that has a remote chance of sniffing an NBA career. In recent seasons, the Thunder have stripped down their team to the studs and are patiently constructing the roster piece by piece with little attention on their win-loss record, all the while stockpiling draft assets. In the parlance of the NBA, this is a tank job, and even those who find the practice distasteful concede it's a sensible strategy for a team in one of the league's smallest, least glamorous markets.
"I respect what OKC does," Jones says when asked if he has an appreciation for the Oklahoma City Thunder's more deliberate strategy. "That's what they've chosen to be, I guess. Everything's a choice. I don't judge. I respect it. It's just not for me."
"PICKS ARE JUST players," Jones says.
Officially, the Suns traded away their 2021 first-round pick (No. 29) last July when they packaged it with Jevon Carter for Landry Shamet. In their judgment, they essentially acquired a 24-year-old sharpshooter in Shamet and his Bird rights. Internally, they regard 27-year-old Danish guard Gabriel "Iffe" Lundberg, whom they signed in March, as this year's draft pick, tantamount to what they could have obtained with the 30th selection, which went to Oklahoma City in the Chris Paul trade.
Jones' time in Miami playing alongside James and in an organization with Pat Riley's handprint on it has informed much of his thinking about building a sustainable roster long on veterans and short on projects. Riley told the media in 2018 in his postseason news conference, "To be really honest with you, I'm not a draft pick guy," and Jones has, in large part, adopted Riley's limited appetite for both the draft and rookies.
Jones' first draft as the Suns' lead basketball executive was 2019, when the Suns held the No. 6 pick and were coming off their worst season since their inaugural expansion year in 1968-69. The Suns' sparse draft board included Cameron Johnson, a 6-foot-9 forward out of North Carolina with range. A five-year college player, Johnson was projected by most prognosticators to go late in the first round.
"'Don't take an older guy, because there's less upside or potential,'" Jones says. "That's the narrative. 'He doesn't have as much potential to grow as everyone else. There's not enough raw physical talent and skill. Is he that much better than the freshman who is playing on the team who flashes star potential?'"
When the Suns examined players of comparable size and positionality in the field, they determined Johnson had a greater capacity to contribute right away than Sekou Doumbouya or Cam Reddish did. They preferred his temperament as a more mature rookie on a team that needed to grow up quickly. Recognizing they likely valued Johnson appreciably more than any other team, they traded the No. 6 pick to Minnesota in exchange for No. 11 and forward Dario Saric.
The pick was roundly panned, with some detractors noting that even at No. 11, the Suns still wildly overcommitted to a 23-year-old who was the oldest lottery pick in a decade.
Johnson, who averaged 12.5 points per game on a true shooting percentage of 62.5 in 26.2 minutes per game this past season, embodies the Suns' heterodox posture on the draft. The Suns examined the player as a de facto free agent rather than a potential NBA player. They evaluated his skill set solely in the context of what it could provide Williams' preferred style on both sides of the ball. They thought about how Johnson's presence on the floor would influence the three players of greatest priority in their youth movement -- Devin Booker, DeAndre Ayton and Mikal Bridges.
With a career 3-point shooting percentage of 41.4 in 34 playoff games with Phoenix, Johnson has solidified himself as part of the Suns' prime core moving forward. For Phoenix, it further emboldened them to forgo the tedious draft boards, and zero in on the handful of players who fit their narrow criteria.
Says Resch: "We were prepared to take him sixth if we had to."
THE SUNS' BASKETBALL operations team gathers for a strategy meeting in the second week of April just before the playoffs, for which they secured the No. 1 seed weeks ago. The staff is noticeably small. Everyone fits more than comfortably in the main conference room that overlooks the practice courts of the Suns' new training facility.
When he's assessing the trade-offs of devoting less attention or a smaller budget toward draft scouting and preparation, Jones makes repeated mention of resource theory. The implication is that the Suns have a finite amount of resources and, in his words, "can't do everything."
"The constraints are not financial," he says. "We will continue to intentionally build a group that can excel at identifying the modern player as the NBA continues to evolve."
The Suns have a total 14 people employed in basketball operations, including Jones. For comparison, the LA Clippers have 14 people alone in their scouting department. Jones says he maintains a smaller staff by design.
"How big can your staff be before it becomes too much for the system to bear?" he says. "When you have 25 or 30 front-office people and scouts, now you have to tell people they can't be in our strategy meeting. I don't want certain people sitting and certain people standing. I don't want anyone here to feel like they're on the fringe, or that their voice isn't heard."
The strategy meeting in Phoenix lasts less than two hours, with everyone having a chance to speak and present.
"The people who have to connect those dots must be proximal to the actual team to know what truly is an area of need for us," Jones says. "They need to be constantly engaged with our coaching staff. A regional scout scouting games on the East Coast who is never watching our team practice has no context. This is an intimate business, and I find it really hard for people to truly understand what matters and what's of significance if they're not close to it."
The year following the selection of Johnson, the Suns drafted big man Jalen Smith with the No. 10 pick. Smith played infrequently and ineffectively, and was the first top-10 pick to have his third-year option declined. He was traded last February to Indiana.
"Jalen wasn't better than [Suns backup center] JaVale [McGee] on a competitive team trying to win a championship," Jones says. "You could say, 'If we give him opportunities he can be productive,' but what's the trade-off?"
Jones readily admits that if another unformed Antetokounmpo is toiling in obscurity in southeastern Europe, the Suns wouldn't give him much of a look. He concedes that rarely does a franchise superstar enter the draft as a plug-and-play talent -- think Dwyane Wade or Stephen Curry -- ready to contribute immediately. He appreciates that it's easier for a team in the Win-Now stage of its life cycle to roll its eyes at the faith other franchises place in the draft. But in Jones' worldview, a franchise should exist in a perpetual state of Win-Now with a combination of ready-made players, be they drafted or undrafted, and the right veterans who can support them. In short, he sees a Miami in the desert.
He even confesses that, had he been at the helm in 2015, he probably would have passed on Booker.
"It all depends on what your goal is," Jones says. "Devin is great, but there are 50 skeletons tied to that swing for the star. It wasn't until winning was imported -- Chris, Jae Crowder, drafting a three-year guy who could help right away like Mikal -- that it translated to success. And if you don't import winning around him, there are even more skeletons. So if you want to find the guy with the highest potential to be the future star, then it makes sense to draft him -- if you're willing to navigate the land mines."