I wish we could get rid of that stupid pointless value chart people are frequently bringing to conversations. It is meaningless beyond fulfilling this weird need some people have to quantify everything just to have an intellectual shortcut to evaluate things. Don't even get me started on how lazy the idea of a static draft value chart is just based on how each draft is different in its depth, positional strengths and individual teams needs.
The reality is: No we didn't give up a fourth round pick for Ealy, we gave up nothing because by all reports we ended up with the very same player we would have chosen 8 spots earlier anyway.
BB got himself a player without comprising any of the draft picks. That's the definition of free.
Finally, people need to stop associating the draft spot with roster safety. The reason BB rarely cuts players drafted in the top 3 rounds in their first 3 years is because the skills and traits that made them high picks in the first place are still there and not because of where they were picked. He is not someone who has a problem cutting losses because of sunk costs.
I think fans frequently misunderstand the actual purpose of the standard draft value chart.
It was originally developed by a couple math geeks working for the Cowboys under Jimmie Johnson. They wanted to quantify how teams valued the various
places in line. They reviewed the entire history of draft pick trades to see how
the teams themselves had been making pick-for-pick trades (a late-2nd + a mid-3rd = a mid-2nd, atc.) and then experimented with plugging in numbers until the could get roughly balanced equations for every historic trade. Then they extrapolated numeric values for all the picks that weren't involved in trades.
IOW, those pick values weren't arbitrarily assigned, and they were NOT at all based on the ultimate success/failure of the prospects who were picked in those slots, so the values for each slot are completely divorced from the differences in depth, positional strengths from draft class to draft class and team needs.
Anyway, the 'Boys didn't do create the chart for the betterment of the league. In fact, it was a closely-guarded secret for the first couple of years. The 'Boys were essentially (and effectively) using it to get the better of other teams in pick trades. Because coaches and front-office people move from team-to-team, eventually other teams got ahold of the chart and began using it.
And now all teams do, in one team-customized version or another. The proof of this is in the fact that about 90% of all pick-for-picks trades work out to within 5% of the standard chart values, and about half of them work out to within 2%. I personally ran the numeric equations for every trade over a ten-year period, so I'm not making this up or reporting someone else's "guesstimate."
Trades involving picks in the top five or so have the largest variation from standard chart value equivalency (as much as +/- 29%). Sometimes teams will offer a point value "discount" if they receive an extra late-round pick. And there's a fudge-factor involved in calculating trades involving future picks, although even those often work out remarkably close if you use the general principle that a 2017 mid-3rd equals a 2018 mid-2nd, etc.
Overall, in real life, teams stick very close to standard chart values when making trades.
The point is that the chart was never intended to assign a value to the actual prospect who ended up getting picked in a particular spot, but merely to assign a value to
the opportunity that the spot represented to a team to pick the prospect they wanted.
A lot of fans have this notion that "moving up in the draft gets you a better player". It doesn't. It only provides an earlier opportunity to pick a prospect who you think will become a better player - an opportunity to jump ahead of other teams who may want the same guy. To my knowledge, no team has ever arbitrarily
initiated a trade up in the hopes that some random "better player" will fall to them there. They're always targeting one or another specific prospect who they're convinced won't still be on the board later.
Thus, the standard draft chart point value for a particular slot (opportunity) has no relationship whatsoever to how a team calculates the potential value of the prospect they intend to pick in that slot, much less how he turns out. Attempts to reverse engineer/re-calculate the chart based on an arbitrary/subjective average value of how the prospects selected at each slot have turned out are completely missing the point. No team operates that way in real life.
OTOH, using the chart as a rough guide to figuring how much "draft capital" a team spent to acquire a specific prospect (or veteran player) versus how the guy actually worked out is merely one way of putting things in perspective.
