What is the value of a top NBA draft pick?
Very high, in one sense. Top picks are the most likely young players to develop into stars. Teams throw away entire seasons for the mere chance of landing one. And fanbases dream about high draft picks turning into cornerstones who can lead their teams to championships and one day see their jerseys raised to the rafters.
But that potential doesn't often turn into reality. In the 21st century, a majority of top-five picks haven't even won a single playoff series for the team that drafted them (or traded for them on draft night), and a vanishingly small percentage have won a championship.
Did your top-five pick (from 2000-19) help your team win a title?
As the NBA considers dramatic lottery reform, with a board of governors vote scheduled for May 28 on a proposal that would curb the ability for teams to tank for guaranteed top draft picks, it's worth exploring just how valuable those selections actually are -- and just how much they've helped teams climb from the bottom of the standings to the top.
Let's find out how championship rosters are built.
Jump to a section: How championship rotations have been built Why the Spurs are a massive outlier
Future outcomes for top picks
Out of the 100 players who were top-five picks from 2000 to 2019, 44 won a playoff series as a rotation player for their original team. That leaves 56 who never fulfilled their team's heavy draft investment with even a single playoff advancement.
(I'm defining rotation players as those who averaged at least 20 minutes per game. Without this criterion, four more players would count as winning playoff series: Darko Milicic for Detroit, Dante Exum for Utah, Markelle Fultz for Philadelphia and Tyrus Thomas for Chicago.)
This chart shows the full breakdown of the 100 players' postseason outcomes. The most frequent was zero series wins, followed by just one.
Playoff series wins with original team for top-five picks (2000-19)
Put another way: On average, the draft's top five will have three players who never win a playoff series for that team, one player who wins one-to-two series and one player who wins three or more.
The player in this group with the most playoff series victories with his original team is No. 5 pick Dwyane Wade, with 22 over 13 seasons in Miami before he left in free agency. (Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown have 15 in Boston and could eventually catch him.) But there are far more top picks with trajectories like Nikoloz Tskitishvili, Raymond Felton and Shelden Williams, who were all picked No. 5 in the 2000s but never won a playoff series with their team, than multitime champions such as Wade.