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The first round of the 2025 NBA Draft takes place today.
There will be two rounds and 59 picks in this year’s event, which takes place at Barclays Center, the home of the Brooklyn Nets. Duke’s Cooper Flagg is the heavy favorite to be selected with the first overall pick, which the Dallas Mavericks currently hold.
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The numbers say that we shouldn’t get out over our skis on Jeremiah Fears; he was massively turnover-prone, shot poorly from 3, missed open teammates and struggled on defense. He also measured shorter at the Combine after being listed at 6-4 all year.
But Fears’ best plays are just too good to ignore. He’s a slash-and-burn point-of-attack ballhandler who can break down defense with his handle and execute difficult finishes at the cup. It helps that the draft drops off here in quality, making it easier to take a shot on stardom even if the mid-case scenario is probably more like Jordan Clarkson.
Fears played more as a volume scorer in his lone season, shooting just 44.7 percent on 2s in SEC play, but he also drew fouls at a prodigious rate. His 85.1 percent mark from the line also makes it easier to buy that his 28.4 percent shooting from 3 might eventually level out at something close to respectable. Fears’ stroke needs tightening – bring the elbow in, get more air under it, etc. – but he also took a lot of difficult 3s that dragged on the percentage. Nonetheless, if opponents can just go under screens against him, that’s going to hurt his downhill attacking game.
Defensively, Fears is skinny and needs to compete more, but he also has good hands and, in his best iso clips, showed lively feet. He’ll be hunted early in his career, but it’s not a disaster.
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Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey likely will be top-10 picks tonight in the NBA draft. Our Sam Vecenie has Harper second and sixth, respectively, in both his latest mock draft and his NBA draft guide.
I’m torn about that. There’s no doubt that Harper and Bailey are top NBA draft talents, and that certainly will pay off tonight. But how did they have such a weird one season at Rutgers?
The Scarlet Knights finished the season with a 15-17 record and didn’t come close to reaching the NCAA Tournament. Heck, they barely made it to the Big Ten tournament. Is that the fault of Harper and Bailey? Probably not. They had a bad roster around them, but I also have to think that if they’re as good as we’re hearing, they should have been able to lift a team into the NCAA Tournament or at the very least a .500 record.
Philadelphia has done an amazing job of muddying its potential decision at No. 3 over the last few weeks.
The Sixers could simply take VJ Edgecombe. Daryl Morey cares about upside. It’s easy to sell Edgecombe having the most athletic upside of any player remaining on the board. He also is a high-performer in draft models.
They could also take Kon Knueppel, Tre Johnson or Ace Bailey, but none of these players — including Edgecombe — are perfect fits for the core that Philadelphia has assembled as it looks to get back into the Eastern Conference mix next season. Johnson is starting to get increased buzz in recent days as an option for Philly, and it’s easy to make the case that he has the most upside out of these players because of his shooting ability.
I still think a trade down remains a real possibility. It’s the move that makes the most sense for the 76ers, given they’re at the top of a big group of prospects who are relatively similar in their league-wide evaluations. Logically, a deal between Charlotte and Philadelphia makes a ton of sense. Since lottery night, the Hornets have been thought to like Edgecombe as a fit between LaMelo Ball and Brandon Miller. Executing a trade-up to secure Edgecombe would allow them to get their guy, and then would also allow Philadelphia to maintain control over the draft at No. 4 — either to execute further trades or to simply take a player that it likes.
Regardless, my read is that if someone trades up, the most likely player they’d do it for would be Edgecombe. NBA teams see him as a relatively safe prospect in this class because of his high-end competitiveness, defensive capabilities, shooting off the catch and high-end character reports.
Read my updated NBA mock draft here.
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NBA mock draft 2025: What will the 76ers do at No. 3?
People don’t seem to trust Kon Knueppel's production as a freshman at Duke. There’s this notion that he was a spot-up guy drafting off the awesomeness of his team, but nothing could be further from the truth: Knueppel was second on the team behind Flagg in usage rate and mostly lived on self-created shots. That shot diet included a ton of chances at the rim on straight-line drives; he rarely got to pull-ups or floaters because he was so good at playing through contact and finishing at the cup.
Knueppel very nearly went 50-40-90 as a freshman (settling for 47.9 percent from the field, 41.4 percent from 3 and 90.4 percent from the line), but his secondary stats were good too. For a shooting specialist, his rates of steals, blocks and free throws stood out. Duke was comfortable leaving him on the perimeter against smaller guards and his feet seem adequate for an NBA wing. He’ll be hunted at times depending on who else is on the floor, especially because he struggles to challenge shots at the end of a move. But this isn’t the work of a pigeon.
However, let’s circle back to the best part: Knueppel’s shot is butter. Watching him warm up on movement shots from side to side before Duke games, it’s clear there is more to unpack here in terms of using him off screens at the NBA level. I don't really understand why evaluations like Tre Johnson better; Knueppel offers the same movement showing but appears much better in virtually every other facet of the game. For me, there is a clear drop-off after Knueppel; he’s a lot closer to the Edgecombe/Harper level than to anything after this.
V.J. Edgecombe was old for a freshman (he turns 20 in July), he faces questions about his long-range shooting and he might only be a one-position player. That said, he has the talent to be special, and I thought hard about putting him at No. 2. Athletically, he has a different gear, blasting off into drives into the paint and elevating with ease at the cup for his finishes.
Edgecombe also shows flashes of being an absolute monster on defense with his lateral quickness and hands, poaching 3.3 steals per 100 possessions in Big 12 games. Edgecombe’s first slide can be a bit sluggish, but he shocks shooters springing off the floor to contest shots with his length.
Offensively, Edgecombe’s shot looked like a project early in the season, but he seemed to fix a couple of flaws as the year went on. In Big 12 games, he shot 39.1 percent from 3 and 81.7 percent from the line. The vexing part is that he only shot 50.0 percent on 2s for the season, despite his incredible physical tools. Edgecombe has a pretty limited handle at this point, one that likely constrains him to playing off the ball or as a secondary creator, and he needs to refine his finishing package off the dribble and at the rim.
However, the Victor Oladipo comparisons here are obvious, and the background on Edgecombe is off-the-charts positive. If I had the second pick, my war room would spend a lot of time arguing about Edgecombe vs. Dylan Harper.
Let's take a look at the All-Rookie teams from this past season and see where each player was drafted.
First team
Second team
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There has been speculation about whether there will be a trade high in the draft. Philadelphia, which holds the No. 3 pick, could be the first inflection point, but it is not the only team that could get busy.
If the 76ers do make a trade, it will be an outlier in recent league history. A top-five pick hasn’t been traded since 2019 when the Pelicans traded No. 4 to Atlanta for Nos. 8, 17 and 35. That was the year after the Atlanta Hawks traded the No. 3 pick to the Mavericks for No. 5 in the famous Luka Dončić for Trae Young deal.
That came a year after the Boston Celtics and 76ers swapped the Nos. 1 and 3 picks. Those are the only three draft night top-five trades since 2010 (Andrew Wiggins, the No. 1 pick in 2014, was traded more than a month after the draft in the Kevin Love trade).
I prefer the NFL offseason calendar a lot more than the NBA one.
With a little more spacing, the NBA offseason could look like:
If nothing else, for the fact that players will get drafted tonight and be in deals that aren’t official until the moratorium ends the first week of July.
The NBA Draft offers teams an opportunity to further build rosters. Players already on these rosters tend to be in the background when late June rolls around, but the existing developmental cores of each team are going to play a role in how those teams approach the draft.
Last year, to preview the draft, I examined all 30 rosters with a focus on the players who ended the season under contract; this year, we’re doing the same. Players who were drafted in 2022, 2023 or 2024, or went undrafted in one of those three draft cycles, will be included in this survey, whether or not their current team drafted them.
Why three years? Because that’s about the amount of time a team gets before it needs to make a rookie-scale extension decision. Rookies get a chance to show something. Second-year players get a chance to show improvement. Year 3 is make-or-break.
From there, we’ll analyze each team’s developmental core and see what impact the draft could have on them moving forward. Check it out at the link below.
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2025 NBA Draft needs, young-core analysis for Warriors, Lakers and more
First Round
Robert E.: Has there ever been a collegiate team that did not make the Division I NCAA Playoffs with two players ranked in the top five? I don’t remember this ever happening before, which begs the question, if these guys (Harper & Bailey) are so good, how come Rutgers was so mediocre?
David M.: I think Queen has a chance to be the second best player from this class. His body still needs serious work, and he’ll need to dedicate himself to becoming a pro, but the ceiling is super high. Unfortunately, the floor is really low if he can’t put it all together.
Mark S.: Pelicans continue to offer the league cautionary tales: shouldn’t have traded that pick until the Pacers were done playing, on the horrible off-chance that an injury like that happened. Imagine how much more they could have got for that pick if they’d just waited for the finals to end…
Jim C.: My takeaway from this is that Duke really should have won the title last season.
Get involved by emailing live@theathletic.com.
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The Mavericks will take Cooper Flagg with the first pick in tonight’s NBA Draft. But why doesn’t Flagg have any say in where he wants to play? The only way to change that would be to get rid of the draft. A modest proposal, at the link below.
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What if Cooper Flagg could play where he wanted? He could … if you abolish the draft
Thanks to their role in the Kristaps Porziņģis trade yesterday, the Net now have five (5!) picks in the first round alone.
Those are picks No. 8, 19, 22, 26, and 27. The 22nd pick is the one they acquired from Atlanta yesterday.
I can’t imagine the Nets are going to utilize all five of those picks because that would just be ridiculous. Developing five such players at once is asking a lot. But the Nets are in a position to package those picks to either move up or add selections for teams that need cost-effective depth on rookie deals.
Brooklyn is doing what proper rebuilding teams often do, which is stockpiling draft assets by using its cap space to acquire contracts. And then, we’ll see what happens with those resources.
I wrote about some things to think about ahead of tonight's NBA Draft:
All that and more at the link below.
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2025 NBA Draft preview: Teams to watch, a Rutgers moment and more
If Cooper Flagg turns out to be the superstar that many expect him to be, he stands to earn a ridiculous sum of money over his first three contracts in the NBA due to the ever-rising salary cap. Here are those figures, according to the financial website Spotrac.
Total: $930 million
And Flagg will only be 31 years old in the summer of 2038!
The contemporary NBA Draft broadcast is so many things. It’s a coronation of new talent and a hinge point for each franchise. It’s a festival of “what if” and a convention for trade-making.
It’s also basketball’s closest thing to a red carpet. The draft has been televised since 1980, and players’ styles have been molded and informed by the passage of time. We won’t be able to fully appraise this draft class for at least a few years. We will instantly know who looked fresh, though.
In honor of this year’s draft, we decided to revisit past eras of NBA Draft fashion and see how the league’s most emblematic draft-night suits reflect its fashion evolution. Check out our story at the link below.
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The evolution of NBA Draft fashion and the most emblematic suits from each era
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Fred VanVleet is re-signing with the Rockets on a two-year, $50 million deal, Kelly Iko has reported in our NBA offseason blog.
After next season, VanVleet will be up to around $190.7 million in career earnings through his first 10 seasons. I'm going to go ahead and assume that is a record for undrafted players.
Player I'm watching on draft day: John Konchar.
The Memphis guard has a $6.2 million salary that the Grizzlies seem likely to dump so they can have enough cap room to extend Jaren Jackson Jr.'s contract. Memphis could likely do this in conjunction with a trade down from 16.
Thing I'm watching on draft day: Consolidation trades.
Brooklyn has six of the top 36 picks, Oklahoma City has picks 15 and 24 and already has a full roster, New Orleans has 7, 23, and 40, Boston has 28 and 32, Charlotte has 33 and 34. Could see a lot picks packaged in move-up trades.
