Rookies vote Jayson Tatum, Lonzo Ball as most likely to have best careers of 2017 Draft class

One of the cool things the folks at NBA.com do every summer with the rookies is conduct an anonymous survey with a variety of different questions on the rookie themselves ahead of the start of the season. The results are in for the 2017-18 campaign and it's evident already that Jayson Tatum has the respect of his peers.

The No. 3 overall pick tied with Lonzo Ball for the top spot in the "Which rookie will have the best career?" question.  Tatum and Ball both earned 18.4 percent of the votes from the 39 rookies surveyed, easily topping No. 1 overall pick Markelle Fultz who finished a distant 6th in the category with 5.4 percent of the vote.

Tatum also earned votes in a number of other categories (Rookie of the Year, biggest draft steal, best playmaker), but he failed to finish in the top five in any of those areas. The fact he didn't finish high in those spots shouldn't be any kind of a knock against Tatum for a couple reasons. First, he's got virtually no shot at rookie of the year on a 53-win Celtics team (he's going to need bigger minutes to contend for that, and he's probably not getting over 20 minutes this year with Boston's wing depth). It's also hard to consider any No. 3 pick in the draft a true "steal", so that rules him out of the category. Ball, Fultz, Jawun Evans, De'Aaron Fox and Dennis Smith Jr. were the players that finished ahead of Tatum in the best playmaker category, which makes the Tatum the best frontcourt playmaker on the list.

Smith Jr. was the other big "winner" in this survey overall, as fellow rookies voted the No. 9 overall pick most likely to win Rookie of the Year (25 percent of vote) and most athletic (42 percent) among all members of the 2017 draft class. The NC State product finished second in the "biggest draft steal" category behind Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell, who everyone should be very familiar with after some nice performances against the C's and others throughout summer league.

In any case, Celtics fans can rest a little bit easier tonight knowing that most of the rookie class would have done the same thing that Danny Ainge did during the 2017 NBA Draft: Pass up a shot at Fultz and take Tatum instead (while adding a asset to boot).