NBA mock draft 5.0 – Best available player edition

The NBA Draft is under a week away and the Dallas Mavericks are preparing for all possibilities. With most mock drafts, people try to make the selection somewhere in between the best available player and the best fit for the team. But what if everyone just picked the best player still on the board?

The never-ending argument when it comes to the NBA Draft is pretty simple: do you take the best player available, or do you have to think about fit? For the most part, people are going to say that fit is at least a little bit important unless you either need help everywhere or the best player available is miles ahead of anyone else.

Well what would this year’s draft look like if the teams picked the projected “best player available”? Would teams get stuck with a guy they don’t want so much, or would they find a way to make them fit so that they don’t miss out on a top level player in order to chase for a guy that fits a positional need?

This is a little bit interesting of a topic this year, because the level of disparity from top tier talent to the next tier at the positional level is worth noting. Aside from the front court players, people tend to have Michael Porter Jr. and Luka Doncic at a much higher tier than the Bridges’ and Kevin Knox. And for point guards, Trae Young and Collin Sexton definitely are higher than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Because of this disparity, a best available style draft may not look too crazy this year. The problem at this point would just be determining who the best available player would be. To figure this out, I asked the staff here at The Smoking Cuban to give me their top 12 prospects from this draft as unbiased as possible.

After getting everyone’s picks in, I averaged them all together and plugged them in where they go in the draft order. Here is how it turned out.

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