Best NBA draft steals

Interesting analysis of the history of NBA draft picks

Sports Articles off the web: Art of the steal:

First, some ground rules. I'm focusing on star players here, not ninth-round picks who managed to stay on a roster for five years. While it's certainly impressive if a team can locate depth that late in the draft, the star players have always been the difference-makers at the pro level.

Second, there's what I call the Bill Laimbeer Exception. There's no doubt that the Cleveland Cavaliers stole Laimbeer, taking him in the third round of the 1979 draft. But they undid all the good karma from that pick when they traded him a year later for Phil Hubbard, Paul Mokeski and the draft pick that became John Bagley. It's tough to credit Cleveland with a "steal" when the Cavaliers had no idea what they had and never benefited from the selection. Thus, I left guys like Laimbeer, Mark Eaton (a third-round pick by Phoenix) and Ron Boone (an eighth-rounder by the ABA's Dallas Chaparrals) off the list.

So with that in mind, here's one man's list of the 10 greatest draft steals in NBA history:

More here Sports Articles off the web: Art of the steal, naming these players as "steals":

Arvydas Sabonis and Drazen Petrovic
Kobe Bryant
Alex English
Michael Jordan
Willis Reed
Nate Archibald

(No. 19 [second round] by Cincinnati, 1970): The Royals/Kings didn't have a proud history in their pre-Sacramento days, but one player they could point to with pride was Tiny. They stole Archibald in Round 2 of 1970, and three years later had the only player in history to lead the league in scoring and assists in the same season. Of course, by then the team was in a different city (actually two, if you count Omaha --- and whose idea was that Kansas City-Omaha Kings business, anyway? Didn't the owners look at a map first? I mean, Omaha and Kansas City are 185 miles apart -- the same distance between New York and Baltimore. Can you imagine having the New York-Baltimore Knicks? No wonder the league almost went bankrupt.)

Hal Greer
John Stockton
Larry Bird
Karl Malone

and others