The August edition of the Basketball Times featured our NBA Draft recap. You can read the column here. This year an all-time high of twelve international players were drafted in the first round and another seven were drafted in the second round. NetScouts Basketball’s projections on the international players were very accurate.
We were the only major service to predict that Cleveland would take Anthony Bennett with the #1 pick. We had Alex Len #2 (he went #5), Kelly Olynyk #14 (he went #13), Dennis Schroder at #16 (he went #17), Giannis Antetokounmpo at #18 (he went #15) and had Sergey Karasev #20 (he went #19).
We profiled 15 true international players (those not playing at colleges in the USA) for NBA.com. Of those 13 were drafted and the only two that weren’t pulled their names out prior to the draft.
So it was a good year on the draft board for NetScouts Basketball, and a very good draft year for international players.