A depressing realization of this offseason has been that John Hollinger’s annual “draft rater” column — one of my favorite seasonal NBA reads — is no more. Hollinger is still running draft prospects through his rating system, of course. Only now, as VP of Basketball Operations in Memphis, it’s for internal Grizzlies use only.
We’re two weeks away from the first draft for the Grizzlies’ new regime, even if they only have a trio of second-round picks with which to work. And while Hollinger’s “draft rater” process certainly won’t be the sole determinant of what the team does, it will have a big role in the team’s draft-night decisions.
Unique among NBA decision-makers, Hollinger’s past pre-draft thoughts are public record. Here are the links for Hollinger’s year-by-year draft rater findings, though you might need an ESPN Insider account to read them in full:
Perhaps Hollinger’s past assessments can provide a clue to what kind of picks the team will make going forward. And I might attempt to play that game in another draft preview post over the next couple of weeks.
But first, I thought it would be interesting to retroactively apply Hollinger’s published draft rater pieces to past Grizzlies drafts. How might these drafts have been different if Hollinger had been making the picks?
First, a few caveats:
*Hollinger’s draft rater only runs projections for players with college experience and thus doesn’t factor in players making the jump straight from high school (relevant to the earlier drafts) or international players.
*Hollinger only published a full, subjective draft board — adding international players and accounting for factors the draft rater can’t measure — for 2011 and 2012. In prior years, only raw draft rater rankings were presented. So it’s more of a stretch to say “this is who Hollinger would have picked” in those years, but going strictly by draft-rater rankings still gives a pretty good indication. And better that than trying to predict subjective adjustments. (With one exception.)
*The first draft rater was published in 2007, though Hollinger did a retroactive look at the system’s projections for the years 2002-2006 focusing only on lottery-level picks, updating 2007 and 2008 projections with new system tweaks in the process. So there generally isn’t enough information to assign second-round picks for earlier years.
All that said, here is how the draft rater suggests Hollinger would have picked for each Grizzlies’ draft since 2002, with explanatory notes:
