FanPost

Mathematical Proof the Knicks Won the Draft

I realize it is a bit early in his NBA career to predict a hall of fame career for Knick draft pick Tim Hardaway Jr. but as it turns out he has the greatest chance of any 2013 NBA draftee to do just that. I will get to the scientific proof of this premise shortly, but first let me digress.

I noticed (and responded) to several comments in the immediate post draft comments. The gist of these comments was that just because a player has a parent/father who played in the NBA , this is no predictor of success. Also, these players were more than likely over privileged spoiled brats. I got the sense that many people feel an NBA pedigree gives these players an undeserved, and by implication, unfair advantage over their peers.

Let's go inside the numbers with a little thought experiment. You may disagree with some of my numbers but here they are.

I estimate that 3 of the top 15 players in today's NBA have a dad who also played in the NBA. They would be Kobe Bryant, Kevin Love and Stephen Curry. I am not sure if any of the other top 15 players have NBA parents, or even who exactly those other players are. But for the sake of this argument I am saying that those 3 are the only ones. In other words 20% of the top players in the league have an NBA pedigree.

Now lets consider the size of the pool of parents who fostered this group. If there are 500 players in the league and the attrition rate is 10% per year that means if one goes back 30 years , based on a 32 team league with 16 player rosters, you have a group of at very most 2000 potential male parents. Compare that with the millions of potential male parents that were not in the NBA. I would estimate there are easily 25 million persons in that non NBA parent group in the USA alone.

Doing the numbers the chances of an NBA parent having a potential all star progeny is a small but significant 666 to 1. The chances for a non NBA parent are closer to 2 million to 1. In other words, based on pedigree alone, it is thirty three hundred times more likely that Tim Hardaway Jr. become a Hall of Fame calibir allstar than any draftee but one. I like those odds and obviously so does Glen Grunwald.