About Draft Stash
Trading in the NBA is hard. Teams have to juggle player value, team fit, trade eligibility periods, and, of course, the NBA's complex financial restrictions. With all of these road blocks, finding mutually beneficial trades is arduous. Often, draft picks are used to make up for value mismatches in trades.
Draft picks are the NBA's closest thing to a liquid currency. One reason for this is that draft pick value is extremely divisible. The first overall pick in a draft is up there with the most valuable assets in the NBA, while the last pick of the first round may be worth multiple orders of magnitude less. Due to this, draft picks are often used to facilitate trades which otherwise would have a value mismatch.
Despite the massive variance in value, even the most knowledgable NBA analysts still categorize draft picks as arbitrarily as "firsts" or "seconds". As a community, I know that we are able to acheive a more accurate description of draft capital and its value.
The idea
Draft Stash seeks to provide an accurate predicted value for each of the 420 current NBA draft picks.
Methodology
- Simulates 10,000 future drafts using projected standings
- Resolves each pick to its final owner based on trade rules
- Applies Kevin Pelton’s 2017 draft slot valuation curve
- Assigns expected value to the rightful owner of each pick
What this provides
- Team-level draft stash valuations
- Expected value and distribution for every pick
Future improvements (coming soon)
- More robust future projections
- User-defined projections and confidence inputs