The 2025 NBA draft is still 16 months away, but teams already have begun the process of building out files to identify and monitor next year’s top prospects.
ESPN NBA draft insider Jonathan Givony has been doing the same for the past few years too, spending considerable time traveling to FIBA junior national team tournaments, college games and practices, elite high school and grassroots showcases, USA Basketball camps, NBA Academy events and other international basketball settings where future lottery picks have been expanding their résumés.
The NBA has gradually loosened rules permitting teams to more closely evaluate the progress of high-school-aged players, making the 2025 NBA draft’s elite prospects the most thoroughly scouted crop to this point.
That process will continue this spring with the high school All-Star game circuit — which includes the McDonald’s All American Game, the Nike Hoop Summit and the High School Basketball Nationals — in March and April.
2025 NBA mock draft
The draft order is based on ESPN projections and reflects the current state of picks owed and owned:
FIRST ROUND
1. Washington Wizards
Cooper Flagg and Dylan Harper at Rutgers next season, Bailey will be coached hard and challenged on both ends of the floor in the highly demanding Big Ten conference. Also young for his class — as he won’t be 18 until mid-August, Bailey has a world of talent at his disposal and has made considerable progress over the past six months, with plenty more room to grow still, making him a real threat to unseat Flagg at No.1 depending on how their college campaigns play out.
Who could be coming back to school?
It will take some time to get a fuller picture of what the 2025 draft class looks like. History suggests there will be several hundred college and international players entering their names in the 2024 draft in April, the majority of whom will end up withdrawing at the NCAA and international deadlines in May and June to focus their efforts on the 2025 draft.
A dozen of the players currently projected as first-round picks in 2024 were eligible to be picked in 2023 but elected to wait and attempt to better their standing with another year of seasoning, a decision that appears to have panned out richly for prospects such as of Kyle Filipowski, Donovan Clingan, Zach Edey, Kevin McCullar Jr., Devin Carter and Dalton Knecht.
With the proliferation of name, image and likeness deals, college basketball has become financially competitive with the NBA’s (non-guaranteed) two-way contracts, making the decision of whether to develop in the NBA G League or via the NCAA much more complicated.
The NBA has become increasingly cutthroat with declining team options or waiving young players on rookie-scale deals. Thirty-four of the 80 players (43%) selected in the top 40 of the 2020 or 2021 NBA drafts already have been shown the door by the team that drafted them or were never signed to a standard NBA contract to begin with, with more players likely to see that fate this summer. With the NBA introducing a second tax apron in the 2023 collective bargaining agreement while ushering in a new second-round salary cap exception, teams are increasingly under pressure to find value with their draft capital in the form of cost-controlled rookie contracts, likely leading them to seek out older, more proven commodities.
In compiling this 2025 mock draft, we did not consider any prospect currently slated to be picked in our latest 2024 mock draft. Nevertheless, there will undoubtedly be several players currently slated in that group who ultimately elect to withdraw or not even enter the 2024 draft, depending on how their season ends or the feedback they receive: Reed Sheppard (Kentucky), Stephon Castle (UConn), Jared McCain (Duke), Yves Missi (Baylor), Izan Almansa (G League Ignite), D.J. Wagner (Kentucky), Johnny Furphy (Kansas), Kyshawn George (Miami), Carlton Carrington (Pitt), Ulrich Chomche (NBA Academy Africa) and many more.
Who will be the Keegan Murray, Jaden Ivey or Bennedict Mathurin of the 2025 NBA draft — players who bet on themselves and ended up propelling themselves into being the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 picks in the 2022 draft on the heels of outstanding seasons?
Check out some highlight plays from Rutgers commit Dylan Harper, the No. 2 player in ESPN’s 2024 rankings.
How is this draft class shaping up as compared to 2024’s class?
Outside of Flagg and Bailey, there’s still quite a bit left to be determined regarding how the rest of the 2025 draft will look. We currently only have five returning college players projected as first-round picks, a number we know will end up being much higher once the dust clears from the 2024 draft.
Recruiting analysts have significant disagreements regarding who the best prospects in the class are outside of the top handful of names, indicating a relatively flat distribution of talent that should lend itself to considerable movement as more reliable information (players’ college or pro seasons in 2024-25) flows in over the next year plus.
We continue to see a steady stream of international players projected atop the draft. Fans will soon be very familiar with the names of Khaman Maluach, Hugo Gonzalez, Egor Demin, Michael Ruzic, Nolan Traore, Noa Essengue, Johann Grunloh and Rocco Zikarsky. We’re currently also projecting two juniors in high school — Canadian player Will Riley and Haitian-American player Joson Sanon — as potential reclass/one-and-done candidates, should they choose so.
There will be many new faces and names emerging this year who we don’t know very well right now or didn’t think of as first-round caliber prospects. Nikola Topic, Tidjane Salaun and Reed Sheppard were nowhere to be found in our first 2024 projection, but they are now firmly considered lottery picks a year later.
As difficult as we anticipated the 2024 NBA draft being to forecast, it’s worth noting that the top three players in our initial projection last February — Matas Buzelis, Cody Williams and Zaccharie Risacher — are now ranked first, third and fourth.
Jonathan Givony is an NBA draft expert and the founder and co-owner of DraftExpress.com, a private scouting and analytics service used by NBA, NCAA and international teams.
