The Brock Purdy Question

Ever since I watched Draymond Green’s rise from second-round afterthought to hall-of-fame dynamo, I’ve been fascinated by draftism. Back then, I didn’t call it “draftism,” a term coined by Bay Area radio host Mark Willard. I probably referred to initial diminishments of Green as “incumbency bias,” or some other flabbier description, but I knew what it looked like. When you’re drafted low, and your success flies in the face of everyone’s Bayesian priors, it can take a long while to be considered good on your own merits. Even then you’ll likely be nagged with pundit hypotheticals about other teams where you’d be a nobody. You can thrive for over a decade and never quite escape the suspicion that your surprise career is someone else’s production.