Welcome to the 2025 NBA Draft Guide! This is the sixth edition of the draft guide, and it’s bigger and better than ever. With some help from The Athletic’s awesome design team, our goal was to create something even more special this year, and I think we’ve accomplished that task.
Every year, the goal is simple: try to come up with the most comprehensive document for fans and the industry as a whole. I want it to be basic enough for an NBA fan who has never watched any of these players to get a feel for them, but also detailed enough for an NBA executive to see a prospect through a slightly different lens. This is a labor of love every year. Much like last year, there are 75 players in this guide. The profiles are more detailed than ever, even down to the end.
The 2025 NBA Draft class as a whole is a fascinating one for myriad reasons. Last year, I did not have a player ranked in my top two tiers of prospects, tiers reserved for players I have a degree of confidence projecting will become at least an All-Star caliber player. This season, I have one Tier One and one Tier Two player.
Cooper Flagg is, unsurprisingly, the No. 1-ranked player, and he has the second-highest grade I’ve given out to a prospect in the last decade, behind only Victor Wembanyama. Flagg has a tremendous blend of ceiling and floor. His skill level, improvement as a shooter, defense and overall competitiveness make him about as safe a prospect as you can find. However, he also has some very high-end potential outcomes that could result in him turning into a top-five player in the league.
Dylan Harper falls into my second tier, which is the category for All-Stars. Harper’s ability to get into the paint and score at will, in addition to his polish and craft as a shot creator at nearly 6-foot-5, gives him a very high upside as the kind of big creator whom every team is in search of.
Beyond those two, I am a bit lower on this class of prospects than the consensus seems to be. I don’t see this as a particularly star-laden draft outside of the top two. I like the depth of potential starters and role players that exists throughout the lottery and into the teens. But I don’t quite have the same evaluations on many of the upside swings that others do. There is probably a bit more upside in the No. 18 to No. 25 range of this board than normal, but I think many of those players come with serious question marks that they’re going to have to work hard over the next couple of years to answer.
Really, from No. 13 on down to the No. 25 or so range, it feels like the draft is flatter in terms of grades this year than normal. Then, once you get into even the early part of the second round, there is precious little depth as compared to a normal draft. Name, image and likeness rights being granted to college basketball players has cratered the depth of this group as the collegiate arms race has swung into full gear. Players across the country received multiple millions of dollars to stay in college basketball this year, which has cratered the second round and undrafted free-agent group.
What should you expect in the week of the draft, which takes place on June 25 and 26? I think there is potential for madness. Why? Several stars could move throughout this offseason, and draft week could be the week when it happens.
As I’ve covered the draft and NBA as a whole, I’ve also started to adjust what I look for in players and the kinds of players who tend to be valuable to me as an evaluator. For instance, this year, you will not find a single player in my lottery who is under 6-foot-4 without shoes, with V.J. Edgecombe ending up as the smallest. In today’s NBA, it’s just exceptionally difficult to be small while providing value. Essentially, smaller lead creators need to either hit All-Star status or risk turning into bench players, as many of them are defensive liabilities. What I value is finding players who can dribble, pass, shoot and defend, all while doing so with positional size. Those are the guys in the modern NBA who have value. Can you achieve the responsibilities of your role on defense? Can you hit shots and force defenses to stay in rotation when you play off the ball? Can you create your own shot and threaten defenses? And can you process the game at a high enough level to make quick decisions, space the court off the ball and make high-level passing reads when you have the ball? Precious few players are going to achieve all of these tasks. But finding those skills is the baseline goal.
So, in that vein, this year there are certainly guys who I feel like I’m higher on than consensus, much like there are every year. Those players that I’m higher on are Kon Knueppel, Cedric Coward, Collin Murray-Boyles, Noah Penda and Ryan Kalkbrenner. The guys I’m probably a bit lower on than consensus? Jeremiah Fears, Egor Demin, Noa Essengue and Rasheer Fleming. If you notice a trend there, I hope it’s that I value high-level processors of the game with size and skill, while downgrading players who I think are interesting on-ball upside swings but have a lower chance to hit any sort of threshold with the ball in their hands.
One final note: This guide may be updated after the international withdrawal deadline date. I have currently not included any international prospects outside of the top 50, as many of those players also have significant money on the table to head to college basketball. Even many of the players who are theoretically automatically eligible for the draft as international players by nature of turning 22 this calendar year are considering the collegiate route. If there are surprise decisions, we will include those when they occur!
Hope you enjoy!
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(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; photos of, from left, V.J. Edgecombe, Cooper Flagg and Tre Johnson: Jacob Kupferman, Jared C. Tilton and Rich Graessle /Icon Sportswire / Getty Images)
