How the Raptors Pick Players: Build a Hiring Process That Tests

The strategy: long, athletic, switch everything on defense.

The values that strategy needs, effort every possession, and no ego about guarding the other team's best player.

Then the competencies, broken into the pieces HR people call knowledge, skills, abilities, and everything else.

Knowledge: reading an offense, knowing the scheme.

Skills: switching footwork, talking on defense, hitting an open shot.

Abilities: length, lateral quickness, the engine to do it for forty minutes.

And everything else, coachability, how a guy handles a bad night.

That last bucket is where personality lives.

Now, how does an NBA team test all of that? First, film.

Scouts watch prospects play real games over and over.

That's the closest thing to watching someone actually do the job.

Second, the draft combine.

Every top prospect goes through the same measurements and the same tests.

Size, strength, agility, shooting.

Same test, same conditions for everyone.

That's what makes the numbers comparable.

Third, interviews and personality.

Teams sit down with prospects, and some bring in psychologists.

But here's an honest note from a former NBA front office analyst, Ben Falk.

Those combine interviews are mostly unstructured, and unstructured interviews have a pretty weak track record of predicting success in basketball or anywhere else.

Fourth, medicals and private workouts.

Teams bring players in and put them through drills that look like their own system.

Then the Raptors did something extra.

They treated the first stretch of a career like a long, real-world test.