Atlanta Hawks: 10 Best NBA Draft Picks Since 1990

You know both Josh Smith and Al Horford are going to find themselves on any list of the Atlanta Hawks' best draft picks, but who will join them as we take a look at the best picks the franchise has made since 1990? 

To be perfectly honest, there really haven't been that many good ones as the No. 10 pick of the last 22 years only managed to just about break even with the expectations based upon his draft slot. 

But regardless of just how good each individual pick was, we're going to look at them. 

Read on for the 10 best draft picks by the Atlanta Hawks since 1990. 

How Draft Value Was Determined

First of all, what exactly can teams count on when they make a draft pick?

Well, unless a team releases or trades a player, they are under the team's control after the draft for up to four years, the maximum length of a rookie contract. So really, when looking at draft steals, we should focus almost exclusively on the first four years of a player's career. 

As a result, I looked at the first four years of Win Shares data for a player, as provided by basketball-reference.com.

Win Shares are an advanced basketball metric calculated so that one Win Share is exactly equal to one win provided by that player to his team's cause. It's the combination of Offensive Win Shares and Defensive Win Shares, a full breakdown of which can be found on this page, called "Calculating Win Shares."

Starting with the year 1990, when the NBA draft first introduced the current lottery system, I looked at each and every single player drafted into The Association, tracking their draft position and the amount of Win Shares they produced in their first four seasons in the league. It is important to note that I only evaluated data through the 2007 draft because the players taken in 2008-2011 have not yet played out their first four seasons in the league.

Moreover, players who were drafted by one team and immediately traded to another were considered as drafted by the team who wound up with their services. 

After I had data for all 1,028 players drafted from 1990-2007, I took the average number of Four-Year Win Shares for each draft position and plotted them on a scatterplot (which you can see in the embedded picture with draft position along the x-axis and Four-Year Win Shares along the y-axis).

Using a best-fit logistical regression, I found the following formula: Four-Year Win Shares = -5.836* ln (draft position) +24.537.

For the statistically inclined out there, that equation has a coefficient of determination (r^2) of 0.91024. For the non-statistically inclined, the equation fits extremely well. 

Using this formula, we can plug in a number for draft position and have the formula show how many Four-Year Win Shares a player drafted there should be expected to produce. For example, the first overall pick of a draft should produce 24.537 Win Shares while the 30th overall pick should produce 4.688. 

With that data firmly established, we can tell exactly how much players have exceeded or failed to live up to the expectations associated with the slot in which they were drafted. That can be done by subtracting the expected win shares based on the draft position from the actual number of Four-Year Win Shares that players produced.

If the difference is positive, the player exceeded expectations by that much and was a bit of a steal. If the difference is negative, the player failed to live up to the expectations and was a bit of a bust. 

Let's look at Monta Ellis, a player commonly referred to as a draft steal, for an example.  

Ellis was drafted 40th overall, so he should have been expected to produce 3.08 Four-Year Win Shares. The shooting guard actually produced 13.7 over the first four years of his career, meaning that the Golden State Warriors "stole" 10.69 Four-Year Win Shares when they drafted him. This was still a great pick, there's no denying that. It's just not as great as quite a few players drafted ahead of him.

It's important to realize exactly what we're looking at. As some of you may have realized, even No. 1 picks may be considered steals.

Because I was only able to look at data from 1990-2007 as the last four draft classes haven't yet played out their fourth seasons in the league, players drafted in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 have to be excluded from this list.  

10. Solomon Jones (No. 33 in 2006)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 4.3

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 4.1

Difference: 0.2 

Solomon Jones may be a surprising name to see at the start of this slideshow, but that's what happens when you analyze the draft successes of a relatively inept drafting franchise. 

During the first four years of his career, the big man from South Florida started just 10 games, eight with the Atlanta Hawks during his rookie season and two with the Indiana Pacers in the final year of that time frame. 

Over the course of his first three seasons in the NBA, all of which were spent with the team that drafted him in the second round of the 2006 NBA draft, Jones averaged just 2.6 points and 2.1 rebounds per contest. 

9. Chris Crawford (No. 50 in 1997)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 3.4

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 1.7

Difference: 1.7 

Chris Crawford spent all seven seasons of his brief NBA career with the Atlanta Hawks before tearing a ligament in his right knee, missing the entire 2004-2005 season and failing to make the roster with the New Jersey Nets. 

After a consistently impressive four-year career with the Marquette Golden Eagles, Crawford barely avoided going undrafted and then managed to become a fairly valuable performer off the bench for the Hawks. 

He came off the bench for all 40 games in which he appeared as a rookie and then started 63 contests over he next three seasons. 

During his first four years in The Association, the 6'9" forward from Kalamazoo, Michigan averaged 5.5 points, 1.8 rebounds and 0.6 assists per game. 

8. Adam Keefe (No. 10 in 1992)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 13.4

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 11.1

Difference: 2.3 

Adam Keefe may be most well known for his time spent with the Utah Jazz, but the big man from Stanford spent the first two years of his career balling with the Atlanta Hawks, the same team that selected him 10th overall in the 1992 NBA draft. 

Keefe appeared in all 82 games during his rookie season, starting just six of them. He averaged 6.6 points and 5.3 rebounds per game that season while earning 3.3 Win Shares. 

Although he went through a bit of a sophomore slump, Keefe joined up with the Utah Jazz for the 1994-1995 season and played a very efficient two years to wind up the four-year span we care about here. 

7. Alan Henderson (No. 16 in 1995)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 12.4

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 8.4

Difference: 4.0

After four outstanding years with the Indiana Hoosiers, Alan Henderson joined up with the Atlanta Hawks and spent the first nine seasons of his career with the team before he was traded away to the Dallas Mavericks along with Jason Terry. 

Henderson struggled during his first two seasons, averaging 6.4 points and 4.3 rebounds per game in the 109 contests he played in. 

But during the 1997-1998 season, the 6'9" power forward began to start games and was named the NBA's Most Improved Player after averaging 14.3 points and 6.4 rebounds per game while earning 6.0 Win Shares in that season alone. 

6. Boris Diaw (No. 21 in 2003)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 14.4

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 6.8

Difference: 7.6 

Now overweight and playing with a pathetic Charlotte Bobcats team, Boris Diaw began his career with the Atlanta Hawks in 2003. 

Even though he started 62 games over his first two seasons, he only managed to average 4.6 points and 3.6 rebounds per contest. 

Things changed when he was sent to the Phoenix Suns for Joe Johnson. He averaged 13.3 points, 6.9 rebounds and 6.2 assists per game during the 2005-2006 season and was named the NBA's Most Improved Player.

A great all-around player who can line up at a number of positions, Diaw still managed to become a valuable player in his own right, even if his best move for the Atlanta Hawks was helping get Joe in a Hawks' uniform.  

5. Josh Smith (No. 17 in 2004)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 16.2

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 8.0

Difference: 8.2 

The youngest player in NBA history to block 500 and 1,000 shots, Josh Smith was an elite defender from his first day on the basketball court, but it took him a lot over two seasons to get his offensive game in shape.

A prep-to-pro player, Smith was entrenched as a starter almost from the get-go, and he proved to the Atlanta Hawks that he was definitely worth the while.

Although he wasn't playing like an All-Star during the first four years of his career, like he did this season (I'm still a little bitter that he was snubbed), Smith still put up stellar numbers during that time, averaging 13.6 points, 7.4 rebounds, 1.1 steals and 2.6 blocks per game.

Amazingly enough, 12.5 of the 16.2 Win Shares he earned during the first four years with the Hawks were earned on the defensive end of the court.  

4. Josh Childress (No. 6 in 2004)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 23.4

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 14.1

Difference: 9.3 

It's hard to remember that Josh Childress actually used to be a pretty good scorer. After all, Childress has completely fallen off after he spent a few years with Olympiacos during the prime of his career. 

Fresh out of Stanford, the lottery pick averaged 10.1 points and 6.0 rebounds per game as a rookie. 

Although his counting stats remained fairly similar during his entire four-year career with the Atlanta Hawks, Childress became more and more efficient throughout that time. 

3. Stacey Augmon (No. 9 in 1991)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 22.2

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 11.7

Difference: 10.5 

Stacey Augmon was firmly entrenched as a starting swingman for the Atlanta Hawks from the moment he was drafted as he started 306 of the 313 games he appeared in during the first four years of his professional career. 

The Plastic Man averaged 14.0 points, 4.7 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 1.5 steals per game during that time, although he still didn't quite live up Bill Walton's draft-day expectations. 

Augmon would only have one more productive season before a dramatic drop of in production with the Detroit Pistons, Portland Trail Blazers and the other teams he played for until the end of his career. 

2. Jason Terry (No. 10 in 1999)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 24.4

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 11.1

Difference: 13.3

Jason Terry has played with only two teams during his professional career. He spent the first five seasons with the Atlanta Hawks, who drafted him in the lottery of the 1999 NBA draft, before he was traded to the Dallas Mavericks before the 2004-2005 season. 

The sharp-shooting guard was good but not great as a rookie, averaging just 8.1 points, 2.0 rebounds and 4.3 assists per game. But he broke out during his second campaign and nearly averaged 20 points per game for the next two years. 

Over the course of his first four years, Terry averaged 16.1 points, 3.1 rebounds and 5.6 assists per contest for the Hawks while accumulating those 24.4 Win Shares. 

He could easily be considered one of the Hawks' best players of the early 2000s. 

1. Al Horford (No. 3 in 2007)

Actual Four-Year Win Shares: 33.3

Expected Four-Year Win Shares: 18.1

Difference: 15.2 

When you're drafted at No. 3, you have to come out of the gate running and continue to play at a very high level if you're going to finish at the top of a set of rankings like this. 

That's exactly what Al Horford did for the Atlanta Hawks. 

After winning back-to-back championships with the Florida Gators, Horford nearly averaged a double-double as a rookie, putting up 10.1 points and 9.7 rebounds per game in his first season at the professional level. 

His scoring average improved steadily during each and every one of his seasons, and he was named an All-Star in both 2010 and 2011.