Celtics reshaping 2020 NBA Draft scouting to cope with COVID-19

The Boston Celtics are already adapting their scouting approach to deal with COVID-19’s impact on the 2020 NBA Draft and related events.

In the grand scheme of things, the limits being placed on the Boston Celtics scouting process for the 2020 NBA Draft are far from insurmountable.

There will be changes, and it’s already had a significant impact — but given most teams start following prospects they have interest in months to sometimes several years in advance of the draft, the team has a solid body of research already organized to draw upon.

“I think that other than the finishing of the conference tournaments, it really didn’t change much at all,” noted team president Danny Ainge in a recent interview with the Boston Herald’s Steve Bulpett.

Ainge had been out west to see a number of prospects in their respective conference tournaments before they — and almost all basketball games everywhere — were canceled.

“Those last few days of conference tournaments were cut short, but after that we don’t usually go to the NCAA tournament,” he revealed. “We watch them collectively as a group. So I don’t really think things have changed all that much.”

That’s not to say that important context wasn’t lost, though, as notes assistant general manager and team counsel Mike Zarren:

“Missing those tournaments is unfortunate, because often times you plan your schedule earlier in the year around the guys [you’d hope to see later] … You know which tournament you’re going to, so you don’t go to see those teams as much earlier in the year.”

And while, as Ainge notes, the team doesn’t usually attend the NCAA tournament, it’s loss will still rob the team of one of the best opportunities to see how prospects play with the stakes as high as they can be at that level.

“[O]ne of the really useful things about the college conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament is the level of competition, particularly in the later rounds, is really high,” offered Zarren.

“And so missing those games where some of the youngest prospects get to compete at the highest level definitely makes the scouting job more difficult, there’s no question. But we’ve seen those guys play all year, and there’s a lot of data on a lot of players.”

“So it’s not a disaster, but obviously more information is better,” he added.

It won’t just end with the missed tournaments, either — the combine and even the draft may well still be impossible to conduct in-person, or at least as normal, due to the pandemic.

“The draft workout process and the combine camps are still up in the air,” related Ainge. “We don’t know how that’s going to work, but right now I’m spending a lot of time watching all those players.

“We’ve got it narrowed down to a few hundred,” he said in evident seriousness.

Technological advances will be a boon to what the team will be facing in order to best inform its options for the coming draft.

Had something like this happened a few decades ago, Zarren believes Boston “would be shipping videotapes around to each other and not really getting to watch all the guys that we wanted to watch.”

“The technology now is such that we literally can watch every possession the guy has played all year from the comfort of each of our homes and then have a good video conference where we all get together and talk about the guys,” he added.

“I suspect we’ll be doing a lot of that in the upcoming weeks.”

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