Good post.Of course it's true. Essentially, you are confirming that having a top-5 pick is by far the most certain way to drafting "a number 1 on a championship team". Because if the team decides to acquire such a player via free agency, trade, or drafting in the 6-30 range, the chances are going to be way, way lower than 12%.
In the last 15 years there were only 5 players "who have shown this type of talent" drafted in the rest of the first round (Curry, Leonard, Giannis, Jokic, SGA), 5/(25X15)=about 1% chance per pick. And only one, Jokic, was drafted in the second round - 0.2% chance. On average, you will have to draft for a century in the 6-30 range (1 pick per draft) to draft a championship player, and for 500 years - by using only a single second-round pick per year.
Most of these players remained with their own teams, with only SGA, Leonard, and Davis changing teams via trades. I will be generous and add to this the Paul-to-Clippers trade, which happened within the same timeframe. So, there were 4 chances to obtain that caliber of players in 15 years. Almost all of the teams would be ready to trade for such a player every year, so we will conservatively estimate the trade chances as 4/(25X15)=1%. Finally, here are the chances for a free agent signing ( LeBron in 2010, 2014 and 2018, Durant in 2016 and 2019, Kawhi in 2019) - 6 cases. Almost every team would gladly create space for such signing, so the conservative chances are 6/(25X15)=1.5%. And these are extremely generous estimates, assuming that a small-market team like the Jazz and the Lakers have the same chances of getting LeBron or Durant via trade or free agency.
So, trying to obtain "such a player" by securing a top 5 pick has the 12 times higher probability of success than through picking 6-30, 60 times higher chances than drafting in the second round, 12 times higher chances than getting him in a trade, and 9 times higher than signing him as a free agent.
In short, no other strategy comes even close to simply getting the top 5 pick.
No doubt the odds are much better with a top-5 pick. I have two responses. One might change the math a bit, though not the overall conclusion. The other is more philosophical.
First, I think you were being rather more stringent with your list than I was with mine. If I followed my original way of thinking, I might add players like Butler, Booker, Mitchell, Brunson, maybe even Haliburton and others to your list (players that haven't achieved the pinnacle, but appear to be the key pieces on contenders or near contenders if they can get the right teammates around them). Another reason I think you may have been a bit more picky with your list is that my list of top-5 players drafted in the past 15 years is accountable for one actual championship where the named player was clearly the team's best player over the course of the season. Your list of non top-five choices accounts for 8 championships (actually 4 if we exclude Curry who was drafted more than 15 years ago).
But, in any event, my larger point is more about the futility of relying on any single strategy, and maybe even questioning whether "strategy" is the right word to describe what's going on. The point is that luck is a much bigger factor than strategy in any of this. You might have a strategy of trying to maximize the odds that you'll be lucky, but the odds are going to be quite low in whatever direction you take. I'm more responding to the sentiment that the path to success is necessarily through a "real tank". Yeah, you might get lucky in that type of tank by getting a true champion-level #1, but odds are pretty heavy that you won't in any sort of reasonable timeline.
I'm not a dogmatic anti-tanker, but I think I'm wise enough to acknowledge that any success from tanking requires not only (maybe not even) "going all in" and making wise choices, but also a whole lot of luck that is beyond any one team's control. Tearing it down to the studs and trying to build back up could lead to years at the bottom, to growing back to a mediocre team, to getting a good but not great team, or (only least likely I think) to true championship contention.
If the odds of even going full-Hinkie are not really on your side, I'm not going to lose any sleep over keeping Laurie this year.