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Ah, NBA mock draft season. Drink it in. It's a special time of year, the time when pro fans hurriedly cram as much info about as many players into as much available brain-space as possible. It's the time of year when NBA general managers salivate and sweat in equal measure.And, perhaps most importantly, it's the time of year when college basketball fans look at NBA mock drafts and resoundingly, unfailingly, exclaim: "Wait, what?" Al-Farouq Aminu at No. 5? Ed Davis at No. 7 Daniel Orton at No. 13? Really There's something funky about the NBA draft for college hoops people: The ordered talent on draft boards only occasionally resembles what we saw throughout a given college hoops season. This isn't hard to explain.
NBA scouts and general managers factor in more than just college production when they're looking at prospects; scouts also look at what the team needs, how a player meshes with his teammates, the player's raw athleticism, and whether Joe X will be considerably better in five years than he was during his college days. This concept is called "potential." You may be vaguely familiar with it.
Thanks to all of that, though, actual college production can get lost in the fray. Maybe that's fair. Maybe actual production should just be one tiny branch in the NBA general manager's decision tree. (Depending on the GM, this tree varies from the mighty Redwood to the downtrodden Christmas tree Charlie Brown found on Christmas Eve.) But that doesn't mean we can't have a little fun with the concept in the meantime.
It is in that spirit that I present to you -- drum roll, please -- what may or may not be the first ever College Basketball Production-Only Mock Draft, or the CBPOMD, which I think you could pronounce as "seebpomd." (Catchy name, huh? I came up with it myself.) It is, quite simply, a list of how NBA teams would draft if they tossed off all the other factors and looked only at how a college basketball player played in college. That's it. It's easy. Think of it this way: You're drafting a college basketball player to play college basketball. Who would you take, and why? And how does that compare with the NBA mock draft consensus?
