NBA Draft: Luka Doncic rises to first in 2018 NBA Redraft

It’s not fair to evaluate players taken in the NBA Draft before they even get to play a game, although we do and we do it frequently. To better understand how a team did in selecting a certain player where they did, we need the benefit of hindsight.

Hindsight is like pizza: the more you have, the better. Looking back at last year’s draft, for example, provides a murkier lens than jumping back two decades and seeing a player’s complete career arc. Yet evaluating how players have performed, what their upside is and accordingly how teams did in evaluating and drafting those players has to be done continually in order to make decisions moving forward.

Luka Doncic goes from third to first in our redraft. Three years later how do the other players shake out from the 2018 NBA Draft?

Using our newfound slice of hindsight we will look back three years to the 2018 NBA Draft. Which players have outperformed their draft slot and would go earlier in a redraft of those same prospects? Who falls down the board?

For this 2018 NBA Redraft we will slot each team into the slot they were in exiting the draft, so draft-night trades will stay in place. We’re using three years of information to re-order these players, while recognizing most of them are still young and developing. The further back in time we go the more difficult it is to take into account “fit” but it comes into play as a tiebreaker; for the most part we are going “best player available” when making the selections.

The end result is a wild redraft of the entire first round, with multiple Top 10 picks falling out of the Top 30 entirely, while an undrafted free agent from this class makes a leap into the Top 10 himself. We start in Phoenix, where the Suns get a second chance to take the best player in the draft.