You try re-drafting the first-round of the 2020 NBA Draft. It ain’t that easy.
But given that we like to stir things up and revel in the hypothetical here at Complex Sports, with three-quarters of the NBA season in the rearview mirror we thought it would be fun—while the action on the court has mostly been a bore—to take a stab at re-selecting all 30 picks from this past November’s draft.
So we crunched the numbers, re-watched tape, read a few scouting reports, and sprinkled in our own expert opinion to craft an order of how we think the 2020 draft, knowing everything we know now, should go down.
Figuring out who should go where and why—with some teams picking for need, others taking a flyer on a project—required more than an elementary scan of the draft’s final order and reconfiguring the original order. You definitely won’t agree with all of our selections, especially two top 10 picks from this past November that slide down the draft precipitously. Perhaps you’ll find it was too precipitous of a drop, but we gave it an honest effort and our order, predictably, looks way different than what November produced.
You are highly encouraged to read this very important disclaimer before consuming our content:
We’re assuming all pre-draft pick swaps happened exactly the same way (meaning trades that happened after the picks were made are invalidated). In this hypothetical scenario, as each team goes on the clock, they find out everything we know now. We’re drafting based on a mixture of results, promise, and sometimes need. Notably, there’s no Jae’Sean Tate or Facundo Campazzo on here because both played overseas before signing multi-year deals this past offseason and thus weren’t eligible.