Watching The Watchers – The Best NBA Mock Drafts

NBA Draft 2011 didn’t disappoint in terms of providing entertainment with interesting decisions, picks and trades but it’s over so it’s time for some conclusions… no, I don’t mean judging teams or drafted players with special grading scales [where almost all teams were above average!] but to answer a question which doesn’t require waiting few years: Who Had The Best and Worst 2011 Mock Drafts on the Internet?
(You can also check expanded version for mock drafts in 2012 and 2013!)

Obviously, I couldn’t cover every mock available on the web but here’s what I did:
1) 12 hours before NBA Draft I saved on my hard drive pages from as many latest 1st round mocks as possible. Mostly from widely known authors/sources but I also added some random googled ones.
For more fun and information I also added older versions.
2) I graded every mock by an average absolute difference between the mocked and actual picks.
For example Derrick Williams was drafted at #2 so if you had him at #1 you would get a score of “1” but if you had him at #5 you would get a score of “3”. Got it? If a player went undrafted I counted that as a “30” because of the entire second round. I did the aforementioned thing for every pick in every mock and calculate an average for the entire first round so the lower the number the more accurate mock was.

BTW, if you are interested what’s the score for YOUR mock draft let me know in the comments.
Although there better be some kind of valid information about a date.
It won’t be fun to judge mock which has been written after real draft ;-)

OK, let the mock draft challenge begin! Here are the results… (Number before name means “earlier version”):

Author	Link to Source	Only Lottery	Total Diff	# of nailed picks	# of picks with 10+ difference	Average Error for 1st Round
David Kay	Downloaded from	1,786	100	7	1	3,33
nbadraft.net	Downloaded from	2,071	104	6	2	3,47
nba-draft.com	Downloaded from	2,857	126	7	3	4,20
Sam Amick	Downloaded from	1,643	131	8	5	4,37
6Chad Ford	Downloaded from	3,571	136	3	3	4,53
2Sam Amick	Downloaded from	3,000	138	4	3	4,60
DraftExpress	Downloaded from	2,429	146	5	5	4,87
1DraftExpress	Downloaded from	3,714	151	5	5	5,03
mynbadraft.com	Downloaded from	2,786	153	5	4	5,10
Tyler	Downloaded from	3,929	153	7	3	5,10
Steve Kyler	Downloaded from	3,286	154	5	4	5,13
Jonathan Carrano	Downloaded from	2,714	154	4	5	5,13
InsideHoops.com	Downloaded from	3,643	154	4	3	5,13
Christopher Reina	Downloaded from	1,929	162	5	4	5,40
Allen Moll	Downloaded from	5,071	169	3	4	5,63
3Chad Ford	Downloaded from	3,643	171	3	5	5,70
Kristofer Habbas	Downloaded from	2,714	172	4	5	5,73
Alex Raskin	Downloaded from	3,000	173	2	7	5,77
Joel Brigham	Downloaded from	3,000	176	3	6	5,87
“Ben Golliver”	Downloaded from	2,714	179	5	8	5,97
Neal Leitereg	Downloaded from	2,857	181	7	5	6,03
2Alex Raskin	Downloaded from	2,500	183	3	7	6,10
1nbadraft.net	Downloaded from	3,929	185	3	7	6,17
3Christopher Reina	Downloaded from	2,857	185	4	6	6,17
2Yannis Koutroupis	Downloaded from	3,214	186	5	7	6,20
Charlie Zegers	Downloaded from	3,786	188	4	7	6,27
Luke Byrnes	Downloaded from	3,857	189	1	5	6,30
Scott Howard-Cooper	Downloaded from	2,786	191	5	8	6,37
2Luke Byrnes	Downloaded from	3,571	198	3	6	6,60
Sean Deveney	Downloaded from	3,429	199	4	7	6,63
2Steve Kyler	Downloaded from	5,429	212	2	10	7,07
Yannis Koutroupis	Downloaded from	4,214	214	3	8	7,13
2Joel Brigham	Downloaded from	4,286	214	2	9	7,13
“Matt Moore”	Downloaded from	4,571	224	3	7	7,47

Unsurprisingly [?] professional writers were better than amateurs… although not all of them because CBSSports, Hoopsworld, InsideHoops and Sporting News struck out badly but…
for now congratulations go to David Kay from thesportsbank.net!
We could also thank nbadraft.net, Sam Amick, nba-draft.com, DraftExpress and Chad Ford for either good sources or good luck ;-)

Note that not all of earlier versions were better than latest ones!

Overall the biggest problems in the lottery were with those picks [and in that order]:
#14, #13, #9, #12, #7, #11, #8 while #1, #2 and #4 were the easiest ones.

Here’s the list of accurate guesses for each pick:
#01-#10: 33, 31, 11, 3, 2, 15, 0, 0, 2, 0,
#11-#20: 7, 1, 3, 0, 0, 5, 5, 1, 3, 6,
#21-#30: 0, 7, 2, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2.