It all started so innocently.
NBA teams wanted to thoroughly evaluate players in advance of the annual draft. Players wanted to work out for teams, putting their best foot forward in hopes of improving their stock. Everyone got what they wanted.
That was then. …
Now, the pre-draft process has turned basically batty. There are still evaluations. There are still workouts. But the games played to get those things are at an all-time high. Information is more hidden and more difficult to uncover than ever. Thatap leaving teams and players exasperated.
The Nuggets already have felt the crunch of reduced visits from some lottery-level players.
“Itap a multimillion-dollar job,” said Jim Clibanoff, Nuggets director of scouting. “We’re trying to make the most well-informed decision.”
Agents limit workouts for clients they feel are locked into a certain range, making it difficult for many organizations out of that range to get an up-close look at players. NBA pro days are becoming all the rage now — controlled environments where prospects are put through a battery of drills they’ve tried to perfect for weeks, in front of team executives.
That has put a premium on the year-long travel to scout players at games in-person and to talk to everyone possible in that player’s life in order to put a solid personality profile together. On-court talent is just one piece of a very large pie.
Meanwhile, players are increasingly being told less or are being misled by some teams. In the search to get an honest evaluation of their workout that day or their game as a whole, sometimes franchises are pulling punches.
“Man, itap so difficult,” Syracuse sharpshooter Malachi Richardson said. “You never know until draft night. They can tell you that they’ll draft you, or they’ll tell you that this is where you’re going to play. But there’s so many different things that can happen — trades — so you just never really know.”
Richardson is trying to put himself in lottery range. But getting the feedback he needs to improve has sometimes been like pulling teeth.
“You realize after the first workout you’re not going to get the answer you want to hear,” Richardson said. “They’re smarter than we are at this drafting business because they’ve been in the business way longer than I have. They’re not going to show their cards at all. So itap difficult, but you’ve got to trust the process.”
Marquette’s Henry Ellenson, a projected lottery pick, has seen the same.
“I go through these workouts, and I feel like I did well but itap tough when they always say you did great,” Ellenson said. “You never really quite know, honestly. I don’t think you know until draft night.”
Stifling the flow of unfiltered honest information serves two main purposes for NBA teams. First, it keeps the competition in the dark about what players they like and why. Information has always traveled fast, but it moves at lightning speed in this, the social media age. They also don’t want to jeopardize future visits by attaching themselves to another player at that position early on.
Second, they are wary that too honest an assessment of a player, if the feedback has a lot of negatives, might ruin the relationship between the general manager and the agent.
Many of these relationships are touch-and-go in the first place. A bad review on a prospect today might be taken out in contract negotiations with another player down the road. Itap not worth the risk, especially for teams trying to be more successful in free agency. Hammering a prospect might hurt the ability to get a bigger fish down the line.
So they couch comments, even for players that aren’t projected high. Wyoming’s Josh Adams is living that reality. But he says he understands.
“I’ve tried to not ask for a lot of feedback,” he said. “I think what it is, is they still have workouts to do. They can’t say ‘We love him and we’re going to pick him’ because they still have to look at other guys. So, I think as it winds down here (leading into the draft), in the next week and a half I think we’ll get a lot more detailed feedback.”
So how do the prospects deal with it? By blocking it out and just playing, they say. That can be difficult, though.
“In the beginning I was not even worried about it,” Kansas forward Cheick Diallo said. “But now itap two weeks left, so you have to worry about it. I’m keeping my eyes open to see what team is interested in me.”
