Evaluating lottery prospects across major mock drafts and determining which ones make sense for the Wizards

It’s officially mock draft season for draft evaluators and teams are ramping up their preparation for the 2022 NBA Draft on June 23rd. And so are we! On this week’s Bleav in Wizards podcast, Kevin Broom and I spent 90 minutes breaking down everyone likely to be selected in or around the lottery on draft night.

As most readers of this site are aware, Broom uses his stats-based analysis tool, YODA, to help evaluate prospects and predict their future NBA success. YODA weighs production against other key indicators like age, level of competition, physical attributes, and athleticism to provide a ranking.

I’m considerably less statistically savvy than Broom, so I base my evaluations on a sickening amount of time spent watching college basketball, and the G League in the case of the Ignite players. I rarely do an overall big board and instead prefer to do positional rankings. Because of our different approaches, I think it enabled us to have a really thorough discussion on these players.

Rather than do our own mock draft at this point, Broom and I decided to review a consensus big board that was created from all of the major, reputable mock drafts that are out there. Rookie Scale does a great job of that so we used their rankings for the basis of our podcast.

Their big board “represents the current consensus outlook for the 2022 NBA Draft. Input sources include ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The Athletic, Bleacher Report, Basketball News, Yahoo, The Ringer, The Stepien, Tankathon, NBA Big Board, For the Win, CBS, and 150+ other boards/mocks from #DraftTwitter and other scouting outlets. The consensus algorithm weights inputs based on date of publication, level of intel, scouting experience, depth of analysis, etc.”

In order, we discussed Jabari Smith Jr., Chet Holmgren, Paolo Banchero, Jaden Ivey, Keegan Murray, A.J. Griffin, Shaedon Sharpe, Bennedict Mathurin, Jalen Duren, Johnny Davis, Dyson Daniels, Jeremy Sochan, Ochai Agbaji, TyTy Washington, Mark Williams, Tari Eason, Malaki Branham, Kennedy Chandler, MarJon Beauchamp, and Walker Kessler.

I think we mostly agreed that these are all worthwhile prospects but there were several where our opinions differed from the consensus and each other. For instance, I think the conversation around Tari Eason, Malaki Branham, and Kennedy Chandler was particularly interesting. Branham has been a hot name as of late on the message board so that portion of the podcast might be of extra interest to some.

Who are the prospects you feel most strongly about? Are there any names we didn’t discuss that you’d like to see us include as we get closer to the draft?

Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports