Data-Driven Lists Rank Each NBA Team’s Best Draft Picks
Stacker applied Basketball-Reference metrics with cross-era adjustments and score normalization to produce franchise-by-franchise rankings that spotlight top picks such as Nikola Jokić, Steve Nash, Adrian Dantley.
Overview
- Stacker compiled team-specific lists using three Basketball-Reference measures: Hall of Fame probability, career win shares, and VORP to estimate each draftee’s career value.
- The method substitutes half of a player’s win shares for missing VORP data for pre-VORP eras and assigns a minimum 60% Hall of Fame probability to inducted players, which changes some older players’ scores.
- Scores were scaled to a 100-based 'Stacker score' by normalizing against the scoring leader so rankings compare players from different eras on a single scale.
- Local outlets republished the lists showing Nikola Jokić rated as the Nuggets’ top pick, Steve Nash as the Suns’ top pick, and Adrian Dantley as the Clippers’ top pick based on those Stacker scores.
- The lists measure full-career value rather than only value earned with a given franchise, a choice that affects players who split careers across teams and shapes how fans and cities see the draft’s long-term impact.