Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images

Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images

NBA Draft

NBA Draft: Zion Williamson still first in 2019 Redraft

by Josh Cornelissen Follow @CornelissenNBA
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NBA draft, Zion Williamson Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images

Hindsight might be 20/20 in the NBA draft, but it also takes time to develop. Like a photograph slowly coming into focus in the chemical solution of a dark room, prospects slowly transform into what they will ultimately become. Just two years after the 2019 NBA Draft, our view is still coming into focus.

That view, though incomplete, is still much more information than the 30 NBA teams had in June of 2019. With two seasons of games logged, and the various prospects playing some number of them, we can see enough information to make very different decisions about where each player should have gone.

Just two seasons later, the 2019 NBA Draft looks wildly different – but the top has stayed the same

This 2019 NBA Redraft goes back through the original draft order (as they came out of draft night) and selects players based on two years of information on their value as a prospect. Team fit is taken into account to some extent, but mostly we are weighing the player’s production, upside and fit in the modern NBA. In essence, we are leaning more towards “best player available” than fit but including both in our analysis.

With that in mind, our 2019 NBA Redraft slots the prospects in a wildly different order. Picks 5-10 feature players taken anywhere from 11th to 29th, while one of the original players in the top 10 falls out of the first round entirely. Yet even with all of that movement, the first four picks stay exactly the same, which seems ludicrous but is somehow true.

With that in mind, we jump in at No. 1 with the New Orleans Pelicans, who rode lottery luck to the first pick and came away with a superstar.

Next: No. 1

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