Sports Business Classroom

On June 22, the NBA will hold its annual draft, pulling from an incredible domestic and global talent pool. As prospects continue to play, how do they rank as potential draft prospects? While six Sports Business Classroom alumni used their collective scouting insight to build out an initial pre-lottery Mock Draft 3.0, Antonio Suman took a different approach via machine learning. Per Suman, his AI-generated NBA mock uses an ANN (Artificial Neural Network) to parse through the stats of college players from the last five drafts. “The code learns, from those stats, how teams drafted over the last five years.” Based on the stats of the players in the draft pool, it generates the results for a first-round mock: