Would Jared McCain Go First in a 2024 NBA Re-Draft?
We asked around to figure out how high everyone is on the Sixers’ star rookie.
In a Sixers season filled with horrible and disappointing turns, there may have been no bigger bummer than the announcement of Jared McCain’s season-ending injury in mid-December.
The first two months of the season were already a calamity, with the team 7-16 (fun fact the Sixers were never once in the top ten of the East during the regular season) and stars in and out of the lineup with injury. The shining bright spot through it all had been McCain, who was running away with Rookie of the Year and put together a pretty incredible stretch of offensive basketball, short as it may have been. Over a seven-game span in November, he averaged 26.1 points on 66.8 TS% while also shooting an outstanding 45.6% from three. The fact that a meniscus tear cut his season short at 23 games is just deeply unfair.
With the regular season concluded, awards ballots have been flowing in from media members. Obviously the Sixers’ young guard isn’t eligible to win anything, having played just 25% of the available games, but it got me thinking — where would Jared McCain go in a re-draft of the 2024 class?
Rookie of the Year is seemingly a three-way fight amongst San Antonio’s Stephon Castle, Atlanta’s Zaccharie Risacher, and Memphis’s Jaylen Wells, but that award isn’t always reflective of how decision makers in the NBA would re-do things if given to draft from the same crop of players again. There are numerous examples in NBA history when the guy who was the best right out of the gate didn’t end up being the best long-term value bet in the draft class.
To answer this question, I polled 23 different people who all work in and/or cover basketball in one way or another, asking them what their big board for the 2024 Draft class would be after having a year’s worth of NBA play to go off of (big board meaning that specific team fit of which team was picking in each spot last year was NOT taken into account).
In order to get the final “consensus” re-draft board, players were given points in reciprocal order of the pick they were selected, i.e. being picked first overall in someone’s poll earned that player 10 points, being picked second overall earned nine points, all the way down to pick 10, which was worth just a single point. Here were the results:
2024 NBA Re-Draft Poll
Jared McCain (167 points, 5 first-place votes)
Alex Sarr (140 points, 5 first-place votes)
Matas Buzelis (139 points, 3 first-place votes)
Stephon Castle (138 points, 1 first-place vote)
Zaccharie Risacher (132 points, 3 first-place votes)
Donovan Clingan (101 points, 1 first-place vote)
Ron Holland (85 points, 3 first-place votes)
Kel’el Ware (82 points, 1 first-place vote)
Zach Edey (52 points)
Reed Sheppard (43 points)
Jaylen Wells (42 points)
Nikola Topic (25 points, 1 first-place vote)
Also receiving top 10 votes: Bub Carrington, Ajay Mitchell, Devin Carter, Yves Missi, Kyle Filipowski, Isaiah Collier
A group of 23 people coming up with nine different answers for “who should have been drafted first overall?” tells you a lot about this particular class, but McCain did separate himself as the top choice. With this points system in particular, McCain benefitted from the sheer consistency of how highly he rated in the poll, as 19 out of the 23 polls placed him in the top five of the re-draft. The only player who came close to his consistency as a top five selection was Castle, who finished in the top five on 17 ballots.
A clear top five formed in McCain, Sarr, Buzelis, Castle, and Risacher, a quintet who all managed to produce on the court as rookies while also showing tantalizing upside (and yes, I know Sarr’s shooting splits were pretty bad). After that, the trio of Clingan, Holland and Ware had their fans who viewed them as top re-draft picks, but they were also well outside the top five on many ballots. Finally, the last four notables included two players in Edey and Wells that have solidified themselves as at least capable NBA players for the foreseeable future, and two in Sheppard and Topic whose NBA production is almost all theoretical to this point. However, both Sheppard and Topic had many fans pre-draft who understandably still have faith that they’ll pay off in the long-run. Beyond the top 12, no other rookie really garnered enough points to be worth discussing in further detail.
An exercise like this can be approached in multiple ways, as was born out in the results. Some may base their rankings entirely on what the young players have done in the NBA thus far and disregard what they were doing at the lower levels of the sport in the years prior. Others may still be extremely confident in their pre-draft priors and evaluations, trusting that the predictions they had coming into June of 2024 will come to fruition in the NBA, and that one single season as a rookie in the hardest league in the world isn’t yet enough to move them off those beliefs. There is no right or wrong approach, but what’s important from a Sixers’ perspective is that McCain garnered high remarks across the differing approaches one might have when evaluating young players and their developmental curves in the NBA.
A blogger-conducted poll is far from a flawless scientific method, however it does reinforce just how special McCain’s early season stretch was. This wasn’t just Sixers fans overreacting to their brand new player going on a hot streak, it was a fanbase properly reacting to a special level of play that caught the attention of many others around the NBA. As one anonymous voter referenced, McCain finished 6th in VORP — a cumulative season-long metric that calculates value over replacement player — among all rookies despite playing in far fewer games than his peers. (Knocking on the biggest piece of wood that’s humanly conceivable) So long as McCain stays healthy moving forward, the rough consensus is that the Sixers got quite possibly the best player in the 2024 NBA Draft.
In a season as unrelentingly brutal as the 2024-25 campaign was, that’s something everyone around the Sixers can and should hold onto.
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
“The Danny” is brought to you by the Official Realtor Of The Process, Adam Ksebe.