It’s quite possible that Anthony Bennett, waived by the Minnesota Timberwolves this week, will go down as one of the worst No 1 picks in NBA draft history. It’s his third season and he’s already likely headed to his third team: the Cleveland Cavaliers traded him to Minnesota as a throw-in to the Kevin Love deal and, after a single season, they let him go without getting anything in return. If basketball history does remember Bennett as a bust, hopefully it will also note that much of the blame belongs to the weakness of the 2013 NBA draft, one of the worst in history.
The blame doesn’t stop there. Some of it should also go to the Cavaliers for making the still puzzling selection to take Bennett first overall back in June 2013, but it’s not like they made a franchise-altering mistake. History wouldn’t have been much different had they been more conservative with their first selection. Normally, when there’s a draft bust story there’s a Bob McAdoo or Carmelo Anthony or Kevin Durant or Michael Jordan lurking just behind them. Instead, for Bennett there’s… Victor Oladipo.
Oladipo has been a solid, improving player for his first two NBA seasons while Bennett has been, well, mostly a bad one. His first season was Scott Walker-presidential-campaign levels of disaster, and his injury-prone second year in Minnesota obviously didn’t impress. Cleveland would have gotten more value by picking Oladipo instead, but it wouldn’t have changed the team’s fortunes in any serious way.
In fact, the 2013 NBA draft offered no potential Hall of Famers. Here were the 10 players chosen after Bennett:
2. Victor Oladpio (Orlando Magic)
3. Otto Porter (Washington Wizards)
4. Cody Zeller (Charlotte Bobcats)
5. Alex Len (Phoenix Suns)
6. Nerlens Noel (New Orleans Pelicans, traded to the Philadelphia 76ers)
7. Ben McLemore (Sacramento Kings)
8. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (Detroit Pistons)
9. Trey Burke (Minnesota Timberwolves)
10. CJ McCollum (Portland Trail Blazers)
11. Michael Carter-Williams (76ers)
None of these players has even been an All-Star yet. The biggest honor any of these players have gotten yet would probably be Carter-Williams’s 2014 Rookie of the Year award, which he received primarily through the good old-fashioned method of scoring a bunch of points on a really bad team because, well, somebody has to score them. The 76ers then traded Carter-Williams to the Bucks because “something ... something ... trust the process.”
Now, not all of these players are necessarily bad players – and make no mistake about it: Bennett has been a bad player – but even the best (Oladipo, Len) have been disappointments at times. Others have had mostly pedestrian production, and Cody might not even be the Most Valuable Zeller in the league right now. The most obviously talented player available was Nerlens Noel, who would have gone No 1 if it weren’t for an ACL injury he had suffered that February.
The Cavaliers wanted to contend in 2013-14 and picked Bennett partly because they thought he was the player best equipped to help them make the playoffs. They were wrong. In fact, Cleveland ended up right back in the lottery next year (somehow with the first pick yet again), but the only reason they thought this in the first place was that there were no sure things available this time through the draft. If there was a LeBron James or Kyrie Irving, or even an Andrew Wiggins, in 2013, they would have snatched them up rather than making the unconventional choice of going with Bennett.
Maybe the Cavaliers didn’t gamble wildly enough. Zach Lowe, among others, notes that if have said that if you redid the 2013 draft right now, the top pick might be Rudy Gobert, who was taken all the way down at the 27th spot by the Denver Nuggets to be traded to the Utah Jazz for 46th pick Erick Green, cash and regret that would kick in sometime during the 2014-15 season. The second overall pick in this draft do-over could then conceivably go to Giannis Antetokounmpo, chosen 15th by the Milwaukee Bucks. Both of whom were international prospects and, obviously, neither team could be sure of how their games would translate to the NBA.
Heck, if Gobert had been picked first overall, it’s possible his development would have been altered just by the expectations it would have placed on him. Had Bennett gone between picks 3-10, which most experts predicted at the time, and not gone to a team that was hoping to contend immediately, his career might have gone somewhat differently. Certainly, we would have looked at it differently.
But somebody had to represent that dreadful draft class and it might as well be Bennett with his career-starting basket-less streak, occasionally deficient defense and his frequent DNPs. Now the 2013 draft class would have a long way to go to match the ineptitude the class of 2000, which produced 17.3 wins fewer than a group of replacement players would, but second place is still well within reach.
That’s not to tarnish all of the players: it’s only been two seasons so chances are some of these players are going to get better. The entire field isn’t, however. Heading into the 2013 draft there was a widely held belief that this would be one of the weakest classes in ages, and little that has transpired these last two seasons has done much to dispel this.
This is why Anthony Bennett isn’t really a draft bust in the way that Darko Milicic or Greg Oden were. He is the Dante Hicks of No 1 picks: he was never even supposed to be there. Bennett’s story is of a player chosen because the closest thing to a top pick was seriously hurt, and the team with the first selection took a chance that very much did not pan out.
Ironically, his status as a one-time No 1 could end up keeping Bennett in the league longer than his talent would on its own team. Surely some team is going to be picking him up, at a discount, shortly. That’s a good thing for his career, but it comes at a price. Barring a massive turnaround in production Bennett will never fully be seen as a player but as a walking symbol: the undeserving first pick of one the weakest drafts in NBA history.
