Drafted By
Which team actually took him? One shot per question.
1. Who drafted David Thompson?
Pick #1, 1975 draft · North Carolina State
2. Who drafted Grant Hill?
Pick #3, 1994 draft · Duke
3. Who drafted Larry Nance?
Pick #20, 1981 draft · Clemson
4. Who drafted Klay Thompson?
Pick #11, 2011 draft · Washington State
5. Who drafted Otis Thorpe?
Pick #9, 1984 draft · Providence
6. Who drafted Antoine Walker?
Pick #6, 1996 draft · Kentucky
7. Who drafted Metta World Peace?
Pick #16, 1999 draft · St. John's (NY)
8. Who drafted Michael Finley?
Pick #21, 1995 draft · Wisconsin
9. Who drafted Donovan Mitchell?
Pick #13, 2017 draft · Louisville
10. Who drafted Joe Johnson?
Pick #10, 2001 draft · Arkansas
How to play Drafted By
Drafted By is a daily ten-question NBA draft quiz built on one reliable fact: the team that drafted a player is usually not the team you remember him with. Kobe Bryant was a Charlotte Hornet for about an hour. Rajon Rondo was a Phoenix Sun. Four options per question, one shot at each.
The rules
Each question names a player with his pick number, draft year and the college or club he came from, and offers four franchises. Click one. The answer is shown immediately, in green, with your pick marked if you got it wrong — and that is the end of that question, because a second attempt would let you walk the options until the colours told you the answer. Ten questions, a score out of ten, the same ten for everyone.
Why the wrong answers are the hard part
The distractors are not random. Wherever possible one of them is a franchise the player genuinely did play for, which is the answer almost everybody reaches for first — the trap in the Kobe question is the Lakers. The rest are drawn only from clubs that existed in that draft year, so you cannot rule an option out for being anachronistic: no Grizzlies in a 1986 question, and no Thunder in a 1996 one.
Teams are named as they were that night
A franchise appears under the name it carried in the draft year, not its modern one. The Thunder have never drafted anybody first overall; the Seattle SuperSonics did draft plenty of players. The same applies to the Bullets, the Bobcats, the Nationals, the Zephyrs and everyone else who has changed city or nickname — which is a real part of the difficulty, and the reason the answer sometimes looks unfamiliar even when you knew it.
Which players come up
First-round picks only, and only players well known enough to be a fair question. One-club players are excluded entirely: asking who drafted Tim Duncan is not a question, it is a sentence with a gap in it. Every day is guaranteed at least three players drafted by a team they never appeared for, so there is always something genuinely surprising in the set.
Scoring and streaks
Your score is simply how many of the ten you got. The streak counts consecutive days played rather than days won, because there is no winning threshold on a quiz like this and treating six out of ten as a failure would punish you for a hard set. Your best score is kept alongside it. The share grid is ten squares, green for right and red for wrong, which spoils nothing.
Tips
- Your first instinct is usually the trap. If an option is the team you associate the player with, that is exactly why it is on the list.
- Use the draft year to rule options in, not out — the four teams all existed that season, but some were in a different city under a different name.
- The college line is a real clue for older questions: regional scouting meant certain programmes fed certain franchises.
- Late first-rounders move most often, so a pick in the twenties is more likely to have a surprising answer than a top-three selection.
- Expansion teams drafted heavily in their first few years, which makes a brand-new franchise a plausible answer in its debut season.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I change my answer?
- No. Each question takes one click, because the correct option is revealed straight away — a retry would turn the colour feedback into the answer key.
- Why is the team named something I do not recognise?
- Franchises are shown as they were called in the draft year. A player taken in Seattle in 1996 was drafted by the SuperSonics, not by the Thunder.
- Does a traded draft pick count for the team that used it?
- Yes. The answer is the franchise that actually made the selection that night, whatever happened to the player afterwards.
- Will the same players come up again?
- Not soon. Each day takes a different set and the rotation works through the whole candidate pool before anything repeats.
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