NBA Draft Grades: Warriors receive strong marks for selecting Jacob Evans

By now, I think sophisticated fans know that NBA Draft grades are kind of silly.

So I totally feel Brady Klopfer’s opinion about post-grades — they’re silly and often deserved to be mocked in retrospect.

Nevertheless, we’re all sitting around wondering how well Jacob Evans will fit the Golden State Warriors after being selected 28th in the 2018 NBA Draft and looking at the range of grades from internet analysts — in addition to hearing the team’s public comments about the pick — helps to shape some baseline expectations. So I’ve just summarized some of the grades of the Warriors’ pick in this year’s draft released over the last day or so for your enjoyment. Hopefully you’ll enjoy them.

For those that are adamantly opposed to grading, feel free to just peruse Scott Howard’s and move on with your day.

Warriors receive generally high marks for selecting Evans

The Golden State of Mind community is generally higher on Evans than the rest of the world, but the Warriors still received mostly A’s and B’s for their selection.

Sam Vecenie of The Athletic didn’t give a letter grade, but it certainly sounds like he considers this “tremendous” pick an A.

The team tends to value guys who can handle the ball, make good decisions with it, knock down shots at a high clip, and defend multiple positions. Evans checks all of those boxes, and is an absolutely tremendous fit for the Warriors. He also fills a need, as the team struggled with its perimeter depth in the playoffs after a spate of injuries put them in a tough spot.

It’s really hard to overemphasize how tremendous this pick is. Not only do the Warriors get a great fit, but also they also get a value pick who was the No. 23 player on my big board. I’m surprised he was around for their pick, but other teams’ loss is the Warriors’ gain yet again. Another great pick by Bob Myers and company, who understand exactly what their scheme is and match talented players to it regularly.

That point about Evans being expected to be gone by the 28th pick is particularly relevant to the grading of the Warriors’ selection — although a couple mock drafts had the Warriors taking Evans, most had him gone before the 28th pick. Jacob Goldstein got a little bit more specific about that point, ranking Evans as the 18th-best pick relative to expected value based on his model.

Jeremy Woo’s summary of his B grade at SI captured the sentiment of all the B (and really, also the C) grades pretty well — yes, Evans fits, but he doesn’t have a particularly high upside.

The Warriors do a good job identifying quality role players, and while Evans doesn’t have great upside, he’s exactly what they need as a no-frills, defensive-minded wing player that can make open threes. He’s not a terrific scorer, but as we saw with Jordan Bell a year ago, Golden State tends to be a place where non-scorers flourish. Evans should be a natural fit here.

Raymond Simms of Hoops Habit wrote one of the longer evaluations, which included a summary of some key statistics.

The “3” part was apparent in college. Evans shot 37.0 percent from 3-point range last season and 41.8 percent the year before. According to Synergy, he produced 1.012 points per possession on spot-ups (69th percentile). In terms of “D”, he allowed only 0.683 points per possession when defending isolations (67th percentile).

Jacob Evans was also dangerous in the open floor. He produced 1.075 points per possession in transition (57th percentile). Some of those fast break opportunities tended to start from turnovers he created on the defensive end.

Overall, even those analysts who offered some of the lower grades on the spectrum had a hard time really knocking the pick — the questions most surround how good Evans will be beyond fitting the Warriors’ system.