This is the first of hopefully multiple fanposts in an attempt to look back and see how valuable a draft pick really is. One of the things I will not address in this particular post is that a draft pick is under a rookie contract which gives the team significant flexibility if the player turns out to be an all-star. For example --- OKC could never assemble the current team they have if they had to pick them ALL up in free-agency.

In this first series, I looked at the top 10 draft picks from 2003 - 2009. I subsequently ranked the players as
"Good" = All-star, top-10 player at their position, a clearly successful draft pick
"Starter" = Less than "Good", but still a starter in the league
"Bench" = Bench player in the rotation
"Bust" = Not serviceable at all, out of league (this is not relative to when they were chose)

To do this I used PER as well as Wins Produced. For Starters, there has been some judgement used to figure out whether the player could become a potential starter as a 2009 pick is relatively young. I welcome thoughts --- and please don't say stuff such as "this guy is over-rated" unless you have some backup or analysis because that is just useless for everyone.

Without further ado here we go:

The high-level takeaways are:

***Please note they don't add up to 70 and 35 because of the N/A for some players such as Jeff Green and TJ Ford where I'm having a hard time characterizing what they could become

My initial takeaway is that a top 5 pick is clearly worth a lot. You have a 40%+ chance of getting a good to great player and a 20% chance for a starter. There are busts in there, but they only appear 1/10th of the time. By bust I mean utter useless player. You'll sometimes of course get a bench player which is a bust relative to where you chose, but still serviceable.