Quote Originally Posted by El_Diablo View Post
Not really. For the 2012 mock draft you linked, they had some pretty big whiffs. Quincy Miller at #1 overall? If the team with the first pick actually selects Quincy Miller in that spot, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. Patric Young #2? Thomas Robinson #46? Derrick Williams at #24 and Reggie Bullock at #25? Ha! They also had Mouphtaou Yarou, Adonis Thomas, LeBryan Nash, and Jereme Richmond in the lottery. I could go on, but I think you get my point. They basically know which players are eligible and which players are generally better than others, but they're not very accurate that far in advance. The week before the draft, sure, but 1-2 years out? Not so much. The only reason they are arguably the "best" estimation of a player's draft stock 1-2 years before the draft is that they are the ONLY estimation of a player's draft stock 1-2 years before the draft.
Of course, NBA draft stocks are set in stone years prior to the draft. Players don't get better or worse relative to their peers. I'm sure those NBA scouts we don't have access to had Thomas Robinson and Derrick Williams as top 5 picks 18 months before the draft as well.

Quote Originally Posted by lotusland
Well at least the world makes sense again. None of those links show where the players would have been projected to go in the draft had they been allowed to come out directly out of HS. They are all projections of where they will go in the draft after they complete their upcoming season at Duke. Which of course means those rankings are useless. For the 2012 draft, NBA teams will not be the least bit concerned where a player was ranked over a year ago. I'd be interested to know where Deng was projected prior to the 2003 draft for that year when LeBron came out not 2004. For Rivers and Irving we don't have any idea where they would have been drafted straight out of HS.
Those projections will still made without any knowledge of what they actually did in college. I guess the issue here is that you're assuming that playing in college would automatically boost a player's stock. This certainly might be true in some cases, but I'm not sure if these draft sites would use that same reasoning, or you can actually tell if NBA teams thought that same way. I'm not sure if the sample size comparing high school 1st rounders vs one and dones would be big enough even if you tried to look at it.