Tonight is one of the most exciting nights in the NBA; draft night. While in most previous years there has usually been a clear choice for which of the new crop of players is going to be the first to get snatched up, there seems to be a general consensus this year that anything can happen. There’s a few ideas floating around about who is going to go where, but it’s not as clear as it has been for years past.

Given this draft dilemma, I decided to use MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, to look at who’s being talked about in social media and see if we can decide who will go first. While there’s no clear idea what’s going to happen, there has definitely been no shortage of conversation about this draft. In the past month alone I found 19,013 blog posts, 17,240 new articles, 33,702 tweets and 32,887 forum posts about the NBA draft.

When searching for talk about the NBA draft in general, it was no surprise to find that our buzzgraph mostly found conversations that contained names of the potential top draft picks. In fact, the only thing that came up in the buzzgraph that wasn’t a draft pick’s name was the “Timberwolves” who have the second pick tonight. Interestingly enough though, The Minnesota Timberwolves have the second pick, but the Cleveland Cavaliers who have the first draft pick didn’t seem to show up.

Based on the names I found in our buzzgraph and a little bit of good old research I’ve put together a list of the top six prospects for tonight’s draft and ran a couple of comparisons to try and see who may come out on top. The first comparison I ran was to which of the players were being talked about the most over the past season. In this case, the clear winner is Derrick Williams who held 44% of the conversation. Williams was followed by Kemba Walker (30.6%) and Kyrie Irving (16.9%).

A look at how much conversation was going on about these players over the past season also shows that Williams was a popular topic all year long. However, we can also see that Walker had some shining moments during the season where talk around him spiked, especially during March Madness. Irving also seemed to be constantly on people’s minds, just not as much as Williams or Walker.

Lastly, I decided that levels of conversation can’t tell the entire story. There has to be something more behind the talk. So, in order to dig a little deeper I compared the sentiment around each of these prospects. Looking at sentiment we can see a bit of a different story being told. Here we see that the player with most positive talk about him is Jan Vesley, despite not having a lot of talk happening about him. Something else interesting we can see here is that Williams, while being the prospect with the most talk about him, also has the most negative talk happening about him.

From what I read in my research, a lot of people seem to think Irving will go first to the Cavs and Williams second to the Timberwolves who will then trade him away. However, judging by the data above I’m going to have to say that Derrick Williams is going to be the first prospect to be drafted tonight. He constantly had a lot of talk around him over the past season and despite having the most negative talk, he also had a decent amount of positive talk.

Only time will tell what really happens, because anything can happen at draft. Who do think is going to picked up first at tonight’s NBA draft. Let us know in the comments.