Too Much Stock Is Put In Pre-Draft Workouts

CLEVELAND – While the NBA Finals hog the spotlight, we're also rapidly hurtling toward the hugely important three-week stretch of June and July in which the draft and free agency can reshape rosters for years to come.

In light of that fact, it's time to take one eye off the proceedings here in Ohio and take a look ahead to the June 28 draft at Madison Square Garden — which is reputed to be among the most loaded in recent history. Standing atop the list, of course, are the much-hyped duo of Ohio State freshman Greg Oden and Texas freshman Kevin Durant. It would be shocking if they weren't the first and second picks.

Recently, Oden has moved to the top of nearly everyone's list because of the result from the NBA's pre-draft camp in Orlando two weeks ago. Oden tested out very well, while Durant did awful.

Here's how it went down. At the camp, the league gathers the prospective draft choices, measure their height, weight and reach, and test them on four metrics: Bench press, vertical leap, lane agility, and court sprint. Based on these numbers, the camp produces a ranking of how "athletic" each of the participants are.

Normally guards fare better at this than big guys, so it's no surprise to college hoops fans (or Mets fans with a cursory knowledge of genetics) that Maryland guard D.J. Strawberry ranked first. But do you know who ranked last among the 78 players invited? Would you believe Kevin Durant?

Durant couldn't lift the 185-pound bench press bar one time (by comparison, Florida's beastly Al Horford did 20 reps). Durant's vertical was also well below par at 33 inches, and his lane agility score was among the worst at the workout too.

This has some thinking Durant's stock is due for a drop, but that would be an error based on past history. The fact is the pre-draft "metrics" have been incredibly poor indicators of future success. Consider that the top-rated players from the past four drafts in these workouts were Troy Bell, Nate Robinson, Joey Graham, and David Noel.

Look where they are now. Bell was a lottery pick but barely played and was out of the league in two years; Robinson is a head case who has shown occasional flashes for the Knicks; Graham is a great guy but a mediocre basketball player for Toronto, and Noel was a bit player for the Bucks last season.

Part of the problem is that this a "test" for which players can study. Trainers can quickly add inches to a player's vertical leap if they know there's a measurement coming in a few weeks and can do similar exercises to boost a player's score in the other metrics. Durant, because of his other commitments leading into the draft, didn't have time to prepare as assiduously, and it showed.

But the results of the past four years also show teams aren't necessarily looking at the right measurements. Take the bench press, for instance. We know that short arms are a huge advantage here, because a player doesn't have to push the bar as far. On the other hand, short arms are awful if you're a basketball player. So what the league is measuring is actually, most likely, something of a contrarian indicator for NBA success.

Moreover, there's the bigger question of just catching guys on a particularly bad day, or a particularly good one. This doesn't just apply to the Orlando testing either. Plenty of teams will bring in players for workouts in the coming two weeks and are likely to be unduly swayed by what happens right in front of their faces, just days before the draft. Even though common sense says it's just one more data point to add to a season's worth of evaluations, it often doesn't work that way in practice. One good day in front of a gullible general manager can outweigh 30 games of collegiate mediocrity.

For the best example of the lunacy of pre-draft workouts, we can turn back to one of the stars of this year's NBA Finals. Back in 2001, the Spurs brought in a littleknown French guard named Tony Parker for a workout after the scouting department recommended him highly to team president Gregg Popovich.

They had Parker workout against former player Lance Blanks, who was then in the Spurs' front office (ironically, he's now an assistant GM in Cleveland). Blanks was 34 at the time and had been out of the league for years, but he destroyed Parker that day. Needless to say, Popovich was unimpressed.

It was only after much pleading from Spurs general manager R.C. Buford and then-scout Sam Presti (now the Sonics general manager) that San Antonio brought Parker in for a second workout. And this time he did everything the scouts had seen him do in Europe, Popovich was sold, and the rest was history.

It's not that workouts are useless. Teams can sometimes pick up important clues from watching a player work against another player of roughly the same size and skill level, and of course coaches can put players through drills and see how they respond mentally.

But as Parker's example shows, one bad day in workout — due to an injury from a previous workout, or fatigue from all the travel, or may be just a tough shooting day — can have a severe impact. The human tendency is to weigh what happened most recently far more heavily than anything preceding it, and also to weigh what happened right in front of our face far more heavily than events for which we weren't present.

Because of those habits, I sometimes wonder if teams don't end up outsmarting themselves in workouts by overvaluing them — especially relative to the massive store of information they can build up by watching players in more realistic game situations.

So when it gets back to Durant, his "workout" measurements in Orlando don't bother me. Instead, there's one measurement from Orlando that does stand out and will directly impact his future NBA success: 7-feet, 4 inches. That's Durant's wingspan from fingertip to fingertip, and it's easily the longest of any player in the draft. That, in turn, explains why he couldn't succeed at the bench press — he had to push the bar a mile.

Unlike the bench press, wingspan is a far more relevant indicator of a player's basketball potential, which is why the Blazers and Sonics should feel free to ignore Durant's last-place finish in Orlando. Accumulating this information on players isn't necessarily a bad thing, but like all data it needs to be interpreted properly. In this case, the correct interpretation is that until or unless Durant needs to bench press a basketball, his road to stardom should be unaffected by the results in Orlando.

jhollinger@nysun.com