There's a perception that the upcoming draft is particularly weak and that teams will be tripping over themselves to get out of it. I believe this to be completely true, especially after the 4 blue potential players go off the board. Even the blue players aren't particularly amazing. Sean Garcia is the most complete player, Eloy Fritts is a freak athlete, Granville Jones and Joshua Swan are decent athletes, but nothing to write home about in the potential department.
Once you get past the blue potentials, the green potentials are a grab bag that will require some combination of patience and points. For example, Dustin Saari may become a really good player for someone who's willing to invest 6+ years developing him. I'm only slightly exagerating the 6 years part. His currents look like someone who's never played basketball before.
With that said, I got curious about how much it would cost to build comparable players from scratch, so I created a spreadsheet that totaled the points needed to build a player up from 0 in all skills and F potential in everything to what he looks like in the draft export. Since paid trainings are capped when a player hits 80 in a skill/athleticism category, I added a point value for totals above 80 based on the point costs lower tiers. Skill improvements above 80 were valued at 2.4 per point and athletic improvements were valued at 3.4 per point.
Here are the top 10 players in the draft from the Build-a-Basketball player workshop, plus the 2 blue players who didn't make the top 10:
I also got curious about the costs associated with training players, so I looked at the value of improving skills/potentials versus the cost of improving athleticism, in terms of what you get for your points spent. I was a bit surprised by the results:
On average, you get almost twice as much value by getting a good athlete and teaching him to play basketball rather than finding a good basketball player and training athleticism.