Apricot's 2025 NBA Draft Tournament: Finding another second round gem?

Quinten Post, Trayce Jackson-Davis, Gui Santos,... who's next?

Here are the Draft Tournaments and Live Draft Day threads since 2020.

Apricot’s 2025 Draft Tournament

Here’s an overview of this piece.

1. The tournament is to help you enjoy the draft

2. Past tournaments have been very good at selecting good players

3. This year’s draft is particularly weak

4. The pick is more likely than ever to be traded.

5. I picked a field of interesting prospects anyway.

1. The Draft Tournament is to help you enjoy the draft

The tournament is designed for people who are not draft experts to catch up at a casual pace on prospects in the Warriors range. For this reason, I have sliced it up into a series of smaller votes instead of a massive 16+ player scouting report. These will be spaced out over the next few weeks until the NBA Draft.

The ultimate goal is for you to develop opinions and attachments about the different prospects, so you can

• argue with others,

• dream about the future,

• enjoy the draft with more suspense and emotional investment,

• be angry that your favorite wasn’t selected,

• and then in the future tell everyone how you had it right and the drafters were a bunch of idiots.

Despite our stellar track record, it’s unlikely we’ll guess exactly whom the Warriors will draft.

So it’s time for more! The Warriors have MIA’s second round pick at #41. Normally, you might say, why bother even thinking about this pick, because, in that range, the chances that the draftee will make an NBA roster is quite small.

However, the Warriors have really set the bar high, with

• 2024 #52 pick Quinten Post (feisty stretch 5 and stroopwafel enthusiast),

• 2023 #57 draft pick Trayce Jackson-Davis (solid big man and occasional starter) and

• 2022 #55 pick Gui Santos (energy guy and very occasional spot starter).

And yes yes everyone always wants to trade the pick for someone ready to contribute. Please don’t be obvious and boring and suggest that.

That’s like going to Disneyland and explaining that everyone there is exploited labor and that feline leukemia is the #1 killer of cats.

2. Past Draft Tournaments have been very good at selecting good players

Our past five Draft Tourneys are preserved on the Internet (with comment threads about lots of different prospects and the live agony of each Draft Night). Some highlights from the past:

• 2020. Wanting Tyrese Haliburton over James Wiseman at #2. This is the called shot that will cast reflected glory on the Draft Tourney for years.

• 2021. Top choices were Moses Moody and Alperen Sengun at #7, along with Scottie Barnes and Jonathan Kuminga in the “won’t fall to us” special election.

• 2022. DNHQ wanted eventual All-Rookie First Team Jalen Williams (but by then it was clear his stock had skyrocketed past #28) and wanted E.J. Liddell (who promptly tore his ACL, sorry)

• 2023. Top two DNHQ picks at #19 were Dereck Lively II and Jordan Hawkins, two fine choices. I took a rare personal victory lap for basically predicting by name that GSW would draft Trayce Jackson-Davis, Jaime Jaquez or Brandin Podziemski.

• 2024. Jalen Bridges was the winner of the Tourney and is currently buried in the PHX G-League, so it’s too soon to tell about this choice. None of the second round draftees have been breakout stars; the closest might be Jaylen Wells (3rd place in Rookie of the Year). And of course, there is our own Quinten Post, who leads the entire 2024 NBA Draft class in BPM.

  • Post was barely knocked out in the first round, despite my best lobbying efforts, and I took a personal victory lap for putting Post in the Tourney and then asking for GSW to draft him on draft night.

3. This year’s second round draft is particularly weak

• First, the #41 pick is a long-shot to make an NBA impact.

  • If you look at every #41 pick in history, there were some great picks (e.g. Nikola Jokic). But out of 44 picks, only 13 of them played more than 164 games (two seasons). That’s a 70% bust rate.

• Second, the early second round is always an unstable zone.

  • Players that excel in the NBA Combine (a May workout for all teams) can play themselves out of the second round and into the first round.

  • And players that don’t play themselves into the 1st round will usually go back to college to try the draft again the following year. The ones who stay are ones that:

    1. are older so their draft stock won’t rise much, or

    2. are sick of college and want to start their pro career, or

    3. can’t afford to stay in college / want to make a pro salary, or

    4. ran out of eligibility

• Third, several big changes have reduced the number of players in the (3) and (4) category above who are staying to be drafted in the second round.

  • First, the Name Image Likeness money in college is getting huge. Players are getting well over $1m. A second rounder will get at best a minimum contract of $1.1m or maybe have a two-way contract (half the salary of a minimum). Why not take the same money and try to get a better contract next year?

  • Second, in 2025, the NCAA ruled that players who played in Junior Colleges and NAIA universities could have one more year of NCAA college eligibility.

  • Third, college athletes received an extra year of eligibility due to COVID. So athletes who started in 2020 or before were allowed to play 4 seasons in 6 years. The last group of such athletes will be forced to enter the draft in 2026, so this is the last year some of them can stay an extra year.

  • Of course, these JUCO/COVID players will eventually go into the Draft when they run out of the extra year(s) of eligibility. But that means the second round will be stronger starting next year.

4. The pick is more likely than ever to be traded

Kerr and Dunleavy have by their off-season comments all but guaranteed that there will be a trade to bring players more complementary to Jimmy Butler’s game. This increases the chances that the #41 pick will be traded.

However, because of the weakness of the second round draft, it will probably be cheaper than ever to buy into the second round. So… the tourney may still be relevant, but it’s more unpredictable if it will.

For instance, in 2024, my heart was slightly broken when GSW traded the #51 pick (for Lindy Waters III… nothing against Lindy, it’s just that I wanted a pick) on Draft Day. But then as the day progressed, GSW bought back into the draft to select my guy Quinten Post. (By coincidence, it was their own #51 pick that they bought back!)

5. I picked a field of interesting prospects anyway

It was not at all obvious how to pick the field of 16 last year, but I am very happy with how it turned out, as it picked out very interesting prospects as well as the eventual actual draft pick. You can read all the theory crafting at last year’s discussion. I tweaked the algorithm this year as follows.

Last year, the key idea was to focus on US college students ranked in the Top 150 nationally in BPM.

• I admit this cutoff is arbitrary and is chosen by me to create an interesting group to discuss.

• However, the use of BPM is not arbitrary. In a separate future article I will analyze how Mike Dunleavy Jr has so far valued analytics much higher than Bob Myers. MDJ’s picks have been ranked in BPM (out of 5,000+ college players): #1 (Trayce), #11 (Brandin) and #31 (Quinten).

However, this year I’m changing the approach because GSW has leaned SO heavily into high BPM prospects. In the past, I would have selected second-round projected players in the Top 150 BPM and then added in draftable prospects that were confirmed to have a pre-draft workout.

However, this year, GSW has already worked out so many players in the Top 150 BPM that they are enough to form their own field, so I will do that as a starting basis and then add selected other prospects in another round if necessary.

5a. The field

Confirmed GSW workouts in Top 175 BPM

These players were in the Top 175 in BPM and publicly known to have been invited by GSW in a pre-draft workout.

• Johni Broome, Auburn #2

• Caleb Grill, Missouri #10

• LJ Cryer, Houston #11

• Nate Bittle, Oregon #15 (withdrew to return to Oregon)

• Kam Jones, Marquette #31

• Amari Williams, Kentucky #44

• Sion James, Duke #71

• Steven Crowl, Wisconsin #82

• RJ Luis Jr., St. John's #104

• Kobe Johnson, UCLA #107

• Ryan Nembhard, Gonzaga #110

• Brice Williams, Nebraska #121

• Tamar Bates, Missouri #123

• Arthur Kaluma, Texas #150

• Kobe Sanders, Nevada #166

These players were also invited, but fell below my cutoff:

• Aaron Scott, St. John's #244

• CJ Huntley, Appalachian St. #506

• Trey Galloway, Indiana #873

• Dink Pate, Mexico City Capitanes (G League), no #

These 15 form our Draft Tournament field. I will add any other interesting players out of the public pre-draft workouts, and I may add a chef’s choice selection.

5b. Classic APRIBOT selections

For the record, if I followed the algorithm from last year (which I call APRIBOT, which is an acronym for APRIBOT is Prospect Ranking Inference of Best Overall Talent), here would have been the field: the following were projected by someone to go between 36 and 60 and who are in the Top 150 BPM.

• Chaz Lanier

• Kam Jones

• John Tonje

• Johni Broome

• Sion James

• Alijah Martin

• Vladislav Goldin

• Javon Small

• Eric Dixon

• Viktor Lakhin

• Amari Williams

• Chucky Hepburn

• Max Shulga

• Brooks Barnhizer

• Dylan Cardwell

Here are the 38 players in the Top 150 who have been projected to go anywhere in the second round or undrafted (APRIBOT only took ones projected between 36 and 60).

Too good to keep

And here are the players were ejected because they are almost certainly going in the 1st round and not falling to #41 even though there were mocked by someone to fall to #35 or higher.

• Danny Wolf

• Rasheer Fleming

• Adou Thiero

• Ryan Kalkbrenner

5c. Pour out a glass for these (no longer) steals

Before the NCAA Tournament, these players were in my preliminary Draft Tourney, as they were ranked at the time as second round picks, but then played so well in the postseason and NBA Combine that they played themselves into the first round.

• Yaxel Lendeborg, #4. Played so well in the NIT, he went back to school for a big NIL bag and a shot at the lottery next year.

• Nique Clifford, #12 BPM. Big showing in NCAAs.

• Walter Clayton Jr., #20. NCAA Tournament MVP.

• Danny Wolf, #61. Odd center who’s kind of stretch, kind of ball handler.

Appendix 1. But why BPM?

It’s publicly available.

• Because it’s available! For the sake of this study, I’ll use BPM as a proxy for whatever cool advanced analytics the Warriors use in-house.

• BPM not necessarily my favorite measure, but thanks to BartTorvik.com, I can look at the BPM of every college player since 2008.

  • Even beyond the limits of all context-less analytics, I do find BPM over-rates big men and (perhaps related) is worse at evaluating defense since box score stats for defense are bad.

• Thanks to Basketball-Reference.com, we also have BPM for NBA play.

BPM is particularly predictive of NBA drafts for older players

• Intuitively, this should make sense. Young players you draft on tools, older players need proven track records since their growth potential is less.

• It does correlate to draftability. I analyzed the BPM ranking for players in the last 2 drafts.

• For 1 and 2 year players, BPM rank distribution is pretty spread out. At this young age,

  • drafters can bet on athleticism, strong fundamentals, or other tools developing for players who didn’t play well in college,

  • young players may improve / get a bigger role within a single season and the total BPM may not reflect that,

  • young players may be playing in not their NBA position or role

• For 3+ year players, BPM settles in. I did a similar analysis and found:

  • Almost every prospect drafted has a BPM of #150 or above.

  • At this age, if you aren’t racking up positive stats, then you aren’t likely to make the NBA.

  • Many drafters (including GSW clearly) will take long shots in the second round based on good stats, as indirected reflected in BPM.

• If these histograms seem similar, pay closer attention to the difference in scale of each axis.

Appendix B. What are Apricot’s Clunky Comps?

Officially called Apricot's Clunky NCAA Comp Finder v3, 2010-2025, this system is something I cooked up on a whim in a big spreadsheet. I downloaded data from BartTorvik.com for the top 1000 NCAA men’s college basketball players for each year from 2010-2025 in various categories.¹

Then I put together a simple system to select any one of those players and find “closest comparisons” as determined by cosine similarity, but also with weights. The weights count similarity more heavily in the categories that correlate more strongly between NCAA and pro performance.²

1. If you insist: G, MIN%, PRPG!, BPM, OBPM, DBPM, ORTG, USG, EFG, TS, OR, DR, AST, TO, A/TO, BLK, STL, FTR, FC/40, DUNKS, CLOSE 2, CLOSE 2 %, FAR 2, FAR 2 %, FT, FT%, 2P, 2P%, 3P/100, 3P, 3P%, Height inch, 2PA, 2PM, 3PA, 3PM, DUNK A, DUNK M, CLOSE2PA, CLOSE2PM, FAR 2PA, FAR2PM

2. The way I weighted this probably makes no mathematical sense so I won’t even describe it, in order to preserve my own dignity. All I know is that it passes my eye-test of calling to mind interesting comparable players.