NBA Draft Trends: International Players

International players are part of what makes the NBA Draft so much fun. Teenagers getting drafted who you’ve never seen play before other than grainy looking YouTube videos just adds to the unknown of the event. That’s not even mentioning how much fun it is to guess the pronunciation of a player’s name, blindly trusting that Fran Fraschilla has the correct syllables.

As much as international players add to the excitement of the NBA Draft, though, the track record for players coming from overseas isn’t the most promising.

From a ten year span of 2004-13, the NBA has drafted 122 players that have played for an overseas club the year before being drafted. Of those 122 players, only 37 of them have projected as rotation players in the league. Of those 37, just one player (Marc Gasol) has made an All-Star team.

There are six other players that project to either be named to at least one All-Star game or close to it — those six being Goran Dragic, Serge Ibaka, Nicolas Batum, Nikola Mirotic, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Rudy Gobert. Still, only one international player over a ten year span has made an All-Star team, a staggering feat considering that just over 20 percent of the draft during those ten years has been made up of international players.

What does this mean for this year’s international draft crop of Kristaps Porzingis, Mario Hezonja and Emmanuel Mudiay, players who were taken in the top seven of the draft?

While these numbers might not make things look great for their chances to be quality NBA players, those three shouldn’t be too worried. Of the 122 international players drafted from 2004-13, just 13 were taken in the lottery. Of those 13, eight of them ended up making a rotation for an NBA team. The sample size is extremely small, but the majority of international players proven worthy to be taken in the lottery turn out alright, seeing as only five of them were busts.

Even those numbers raise tons of questions, though. For starters, with only 30 percent of international players becoming part of NBA rotations, does it make sense for teams to consider American players more heavily over them? NBA teams may be leaning that way. Splitting that ten year period into two five year periods, we can see there is a slight decline in average international players taken per year, from 13.8 to 10.8 per draft. As teams expand their resources for international scouting and enhance the amount of scouting trips they make across the globe, scouts may be finding that once they get a look at players in person, it makes them more hesitant about taking that player.

Kyle Neubeck broached this topic when discussing how playing overseas helps and hinders Mudiay’s prospects.

"The harshest criticism lobbed at Dante Exum is that we had no idea whether he would be good against NBA-caliber competition. That’s a rather terrifying assessment for a guy so beloved in draft circles, though at least it was accurate. Compare that to the type of criticism faced by Wiggins (“no killer instinct”) and Parker (“lacks athleticism”), and you’d probably conclude that it’s better to be a mystery than labeled incorrectly."

The other question comes from the lack of international players taken in the lottery. Just 13 out of 122 international players selected over that ten year span were lottery guys, just over 10 percent. While eight of those 13 were able to stick in the league, none of them proved to be near All-Star caliber players. Drafting in the lottery should produce at the very least a starting caliber player, maybe even a little bit more. High draft picks are among the most valuable assets in all of basketball; just getting a mere rotation player with one of those picks isn’t good enough.

Unfortunately, that’s the area that international players in the lottery have fallen.

There were three overseas players taken in the lottery in the 2015 NBA Draft and two in the 2014 NBA Draft. While it is possible these five players turn into decent role players for their teams, it is highly unlikely that they turn out to be the near All-Star type player that their respective clubs drafted them to be. I hope Kristaps Porzingis, Mario Hezonja, Emmanuel Mudiay, Dante Exum and Dario Saric buck the trend and prove me wrong. But the odds are stacked against them to produce the type of value that their draft slot has.