Los Angeles Lakers: Which first round picks have outperformed their draft slots?

Instead of looking at another mock with the 2017 NBA Draft approaching, let’s see which Los Angeles Lakers first round picks have outperformed their draft slots.

With the 2017 NBA Draft finally within our sights, readers of sites like this one have probably seen every possible mock they can tolerate. The Los Angeles Lakers will take Lonzo Ball. The Lakers won’t take Ball, they instead prefer Markelle Fultz and want to trade up. Or maybe it’s Josh Jackson who they are really after.

To take a break from the mock drafts for a minute, I thought it would be interesting to look back at which Lakers first round picks have outperformed their draft slots.

After all, the debate leading up to the draft over which player should be slotted at which pick really comes down to a prediction of performance. Whether Magic Johnson sees himself more in Ball or Fultz doesn’t mean anything until each player takes to the floor and proves such lofty comparisons are merited.

To understand how good the Lakers have been at predicting performance in the past, we can look at the performance of their first round selections relative to the average performance of players chosen with the same pick.

Looking over 20 years of draft data (since 1987), I found the average career Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) of each player selected in the first round. In simple terms, VORP is how much a player contributed to his team beyond what an average player would have contributed.

The average player creates a baseline, so we aren’t comparing what D’Angelo Russell does for the Lakers to what yours truly could embarrassingly muster. We can assume that if the Lakers didn’t have D’Angelo Russell, they would have at least another NBA-qualifying player in the lineup, so VORP compares Russell to that theoretical replacement player, defined as a player on minimum salary or not a normal member of the team’s rotation. Basically, a back-of-the-bench guy.

I compiled a list of Lakers first round picks since 1987 and compared their career VORP to the average career VORP of each respective draft slot.

You can almost ignore the last few drafts since the likes of Brandon Ingram, D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle haven’t had enough time to stabilize their career VORP. We gain the most insight by looking at picks further back in time. What we find is that Eddie Jones (10th overall) and Vlade Divac (26th overall) jump off the page.

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Eddie Jones played over four seasons in L.A., averaging 15.2 points, 3.8 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game on .463/.378/.769 shooting splits. He was later traded, along with another high value Lakers first-rounder, Elden Campbell, to the Hornets for Glen Rice, J.R. Reid and B.J. Armstrong.

Vlade Divac played eight full seasons with the purple and gold. The seven-foot center averaged 12.2 points, 8.5 rebounds and 2.6 assists per game. His most significant contribution to the organization was being as part of the trade that secured Kobe Bryant.

The Lakers have not had incredible luck finding players who outperform their draft slot, and part of that is because for many of the drafts considered in this analysis, they were an organization competing at the championship level. When a team is looking for a final piece to win a title, they might make their selection based on experience or position, rather than gambling on high-end talent, or the type of players more likely to score high above or below their draft slot average.

Next: Lakers - Top 10 NBA Draft picks in franchise history

On Thursday, the Lakers will make their third consecutive second overall selection (unless they trade it). The debate will continue over who is the right player to select with that pick. The answer will be found many years from now, when we can look back and see if any of those lottery picks perform to their average pick pedigree, or as Lakers fans hope, perform much better like Eddie Jones and Vlade Divac did.