An Analysis of the NBA Draft: Are Teams Drafting Better and Does College Experience Truly Matter

Abstract

This thesis attempts to answer two questions. Are NBA organizations doing a reasonable job at drafting players and getting better at the process, and does college experience play a significant role in a player’s performance during their early NBA career (first 3 seasons).In regard to these two questions, we determined through our research that NBA organizations are not showing any significant improvements in their ability to draft the best available players, this is surprising given the increase in available scouting data teams currently have access to. We suspected however that this lack of drafting improvements may be related to players entering the NBA with less college experience. However, after we determined that college experience does not appear to play a large role in a player’s early career NBA performance, we determined that experience does not appear to be the reason why teams aren’t doing a better job of drafting.