NBA Draft Prospect Watch: Breaking the ESPN Lottery Machine to Discover Chad Ford’s Pelican Big Board

Yesterday, Chad Ford and ESPN released their infamous NBA Draft Lottery Machine. The NBA Draft Lottery Machine is a lovely tool because with every click of the button you have a chance to have your hopes validated, or dashed. No David Stern here folks, just pure, unadulterated, mathematical odds.

One of the fun things you can do with the NBA Draft Lottery Machine is "break it" so that it will tell you what respected ESPN NBA Draft analyst Chad Ford's big board is for your team. So being the well respected blogger that I am, I did just that (sorry ESPN paywall). After running the NBA Draft Lottery Machine 50 times, here is what I found out.

Here is Chad Ford's big board for the Pelicans:

1 - Ben Simmons (1)
2 - Brandon Ingram (2)
3 - Dragan Bender (3)
4 - Jamal Murray (5)
5 - Kris Dunn (7)
6 - Henry Ellenson (4)
7 - Buddy Hield (9)

[Next to where Chad Ford has the projected Pelicans big board rank, I put where that prospect ranks on Chad Ford's top 100 prospects.]

Some other fun notes, Kris Dunn with the 6th overall pick was the most common result. Dunn is a 6' 4" point guard out of Providence with a 6' 9" wingspan. NBA scouts have tossed around Russell Westbrook and Eric Bledsoe as his best NBA comparisons.

The second most common result was Buddy Hield with the 7th overall pick, followed by Jamal Murray with the 5th overall pick.

You can read about most of those seven guys on the Pelicans big board I projected earlier this week. You can also go ahead watch a lot of those prospects yourself by keeping track of their tournament games with our Prospect Viewing Guide.

Also, we are encouraging our readers to put up their own big board with draft analysis in a fan post!
--

***Thanks for reading! For more Pelicans draft analysis you can follow me on twitter @jdbillio.