NBA Scout: March Madness 'an Important Piece' to Evaluating NBA Draft Prospects

While fans are nervously watching March Madness games to see if their teams can keep their championship hopes alive, NBA scouts are watching for a different reason.

"You get to watch players in games where their backs are against the wall and see how they react to that," an Eastern Conference scout told ESPN's Jeremy Woo. "This is do or die. So some guys you can see that they shrivel in those situations, and some guys thrive, and I think that's an important piece to the puzzle."

Teams and scouts surely don't base the entirety of their evaluation on the small sample size of one or two games in the NCAA men's tournament, but those performances can be a clear tiebreaker if they are torn between multiple prospects.

After all, there is no better simulation for what Game 7 of an NBA playoff series will be like for a player than the single-elimination pressure of games in the Big Dance, and a history of performing at a high level on such a stage would surely catch the eye of talent evaluators.

That means players such as UConn's Stephon Castle (projected No. 6 in the latest mock draft from Bleacher Report's Jonathan Wasserman), UConn's Donovan Clingan (No. 7), Duke's Jared McCain (No. 11), Illinois' Terrence Shannon Jr. (No. 12), Duke's Kyle Filipowski (No. 13), Tennessee's Dalton Knecht (No. 15) and Purdue's Zach Edey (No. 30), among others, will have additional pressure when their teams take the court in the Sweet 16.

Not only will they be playing for the opportunity to move one step closer to a national championship, they will be playing for the chance to boost their stocks in the eyes of NBA scouts.

One or two excellent performances in the upcoming games could be the difference between being a lottery pick or falling down draft boards.