FALL 2024

AUTHORS

Joseph Bewtra, University of Pennsylvania
Ryan S. Brill, University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

NBA teams often trade draft picks. We are interested in the relative value of draft positions, which determines whether a team should accept or reject a trade, or which draft picks it should offer in a trade to make it fair. In this work, we explore various NBA draft value curves. We introduce a novel method, mapping player performance measures (e.g., WAR, RAPTOR, BPM) to salary using Gamma regression in order to constrain draft value curves to be positive. We find that, depending on the measure of performance value and the method of aggregation (e.g., mean or median), draft value curves are wildly different.