Stats vs. Scouts
The F5's consensus big board for the 2025 draft
Happy NBA Draft Day(s) to all that celebrate. The next two days have the potential to alter the fortunes of every single NBA franchise for better or for worse. The decision who to draft—or not to draft—can lift a team out of mediocrity or push them further into purgatory
I’ll be honest, I’m out of my depth with this year’s draft. I haven’t spent time to formulate coherent opinions or rankings of this year’s crop of NBA hopefuls. So, instead, I’m going to draft off the people that have put in the time.
I’ve created a consensus big board that pulls together the rankings from some of the sharpest minds in the public draft space. This consensus board is not exhaustive. There are many more rankings out there from many qualified draftniks. These are just the ones that I can vouch for.
So, if you’re like me and are flying blind in this year’s draft then hopefully the following consensus board will help you orientate yourself — or at least give you something to look at when your team is on the clock.
One key difference between my consensus board and the others you might come across is that I purposely tried to include an equal number of stats-based rankings and scout-based rankings. The draft is one of the last frontiers in the fight between analytics and the eye test. The nerds have mostly declared victory in every other facet of the sport, but predicting how good an 18-year old will be five years from now is equal parts art and science. So I think it’s good form to source opinions from those that are relying on machine learning models and those that are relying on film study. Also, I was also curious whether certain prospects looked better on paper than in person, and thought this approach might help identify them.
Any credit should be directed at the people that put the time in to create these rankings. All I did was put them in one place. So before I reveal the consensus board let’s give credit where credit is due. Here are the links to the boards I sourced:
Stats Rankings:
Scouts Rankings:
One last word of caution before we jump in. Not everyone in the stats group are only using numbers and models. Some are mixing in their own personal opinions and film work1. Similarly, I would bet everyone in the scouts group is using some form of analytics2 to help formulate their rankings. So consider these group labels approximate at best.
Without further ado, here’s the consensus big board for the top 30 players in this year’s draft sorted by their average rank across the 12 different rankings.
I’ll rip through a handful players at the top of the board and offer some quick meta commentary:
Cooper Flagg is the least divisive player in this year’s draft. Every board has him as the number one prospect. It’s somewhat unusual to see this much agreement between both the stats and the film for any prospect, but that speaks to how impressive Flagg’s profile is. He has no holes in his game.
Dylan Harper is the consensus second best prospect in this year’s draft. Every board has him ranked #2, except for Kevin Pelton’s stats-driven ranking of NBA draftees (he has Harper ranked #4). A player with this much support between the stats and the scouts would normally go #1 in most drafts. Unfortunately for Harper, he just happens to be in the same draft as one of the most well-rounded prospects in recent history.
Kon Knueppel is the first player on the board where we get a healthy amount of disagreement between the two camps. The scouts are head over heels in love with Knueppel, with an average scouts-driven rank of 3.8, is less favored by the stats, which place him at 9.8. This is interesting because at first blush Knueppel fits the mold of the type of player that analytics would love and scouts would hate. He’s a sharp-shooting high IQ player, but he’s also a goofy-looking white guy from Wisconsin.
Collin Murray-Boyles is our first analytics darling that scouts are somewhat less impressed by. The book on Murray-Boyles is that he can’t shoot, but he does so many other things well that don’t show up in the box score to make up for it. For more information on Murray-Boyles’ prospects, I recommend Nik Oza’s breakdown.
Ace Bailey is perhaps the most divisive player at the top of the draft. Some boards have him as high as #3 while others have him as low as #15. He’s a tall, tough-shot making wing that every team is looking for. But questions about his ability to translate his tough-shot making against better competition remain.
To see where the stats and the scouts disagree the most, we can plot each player by their average stat rank against their average scout rank. The further the player is away from the diagonal line, the more disagreement between the two camps. I’ve expanded this chart to show the top 60 players by overall consensus.
Knueppel, Bailey, and Murray-Boyles are joined by Tre Johnson as the group of players that are most divisive between the stats and the scouts at the very top of the draft. Further down the draft (or further up the chart above), Cedric Coward has an average scout rank of about 15 and an average stat rank of around 35. Coward, who started his college career playing division three basketball and played only six games this past year, can be a difficult player for models to evaluate, especially if they value pedigree or are skeptical of small sample sizes.
The last thing I’ll leave you all with is the top 30 players on each board, in order. It’s essentially the same chart as the first one, except I’ve swapped the position of the ranks and the players so that you can read a board from top to bottom in its original order.
Follow the Money
Now we have a better sense of who the players to watch are in this year’s draft. But where these players are actually going to get drafted is an entirely different can of worms. Mock drafts, while useful for driving clicks, are closer to fan fiction than fortune telling.
To sort through the uncertainty of the draft, I find it helpful to follow the money.
The table below tells us the probability that a player will be selected with one of the top ten picks in this year’s draft according to the consensus betting odds on the Action Network.
The top two picks are essentially set in stone. The draft doesn’t really start until #3, and from there it’s anyone’s guess.
For some players, the odds have already shifted since I first made this chart on Monday. For instance, just a few days ago, Knueppel had an implied 30 percent chance of going #4 to Charlotte. Now he’s up to 46 percent. Similarly, Ace Bailey went from an implied 26 percent chance of being selected with Washington’s #6 pick to a 35 percent chance on the day of the draft.
For example, Jeremias Engelmann ranked his top 30 players in this year’s draft using both advanced stats and film study. Nevertheless, I lumped Engelmann in with the numbers nerds given his background as an analytics staffer for both the Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns.
John Hollinger invented PER. So I think it’s safe to say he’s using a mix of film and analytics.
love the analysis. have you done this analysis before?
if so, would be fascinating to evaluate models vs scouts overall, and for particular players and for particular models/scouts.
don't think i've ever seen anything systemic that tries to assess the performance of scouts and models based on player performance
probably needs a good 5 years or so, but would love to see someday!
What stands out to me is how much more variance there is among the stats projections, relative to the scouts. Two possible explanations:
1) Scouts suffer from “group think” and are unable to form a truly independent projection.
2) Stats models are prone to being way off the market if they have failed to account for something that the market generally knows. This is where we might talk about being “directionally correct” in betting parlance.