ESPN’s Vincent Goodwill Breaks Down the 1st Round of the NBA Draft

For most NBA drafts, the suspense at the top is over before the lights come on. Not this one. Vincent Goodwill joined the show fresh off night one and said the mystery at the top of the board lasted almost until the clock hit zero.

"Usually we know who number one is," Goodwill told Tom Pelissero. "If we don't know it going into draft night, we know it pretty much three or four days before." This time the consternation around AJ Dybantsa and Darryn Peterson ran right up to the final minutes. Goodwill got a text from a team trying to climb into the top five that tipped the Washington Wizards would take Dybantsa. The two prospects, he said, will be inextricably linked for the rest of their careers.

The deliberation was real, and Goodwill had the receipts. He polled roughly 25 executives, and the split came back about 13 to 12. "No one was truly set," he said. The hesitation on Peterson was less about talent, which nobody denied, than about fit and temperament, with some evaluators questioning whether he wanted the spotlight that comes with being the face of a franchise. Goodwill pushed back on that line of thinking, noting it speaks to a player's tendencies rather than his character.

Pelissero pressed on where the talent actually drops off in what everyone keeps calling a generational class, one being compared to the 1996 and 2003 drafts. Goodwill set the cutoff at four. His tell came from the trade chatter. "If you got a pick that's gold, you're not letting that go," he said, drawing the parallel to an NFL team that has found its franchise quarterback. Once he started hearing about teams trying to buy into the fifth, seventh or eighth slots, he knew the disparity had begun. After Cameron Boozer at three and Caleb Wilson at four, the conversation shifted from can't-miss franchise players to very good ones, and then, in his words, "everything else becomes a crapshoot."

That does not mean the order is destiny. Goodwill said multiple people warned him that Wilson, taken fourth, might end up the best player in the class by the time it is all said and done. In a draft this deep, someone always comes out of nowhere.

The most telling exercise came at the end. Goodwill asked executives where Cooper Flagg would go if he were in this draft. The answer was unanimous: number one, no doubt, above everyone. Pelissero ran the same thought experiment with the NFL, dropping a rookie quarterback into last year's class and getting different answers. The lesson held for both sports. These are all blue-chip players. The question is always which of them are the blue-plus ones who actually turn a franchise.