NBA Draft 2025: Introducing a Better Way to Order Prospects

The traditional “big board” has been a staple of draft coverage across sports. NBA fans love rankings and debating between prospects, but this often isn’t a prudent manner to analyze the draft. Ordinal rankings are often exciting and flashy but present quite a few problems when it comes to accurate analysis.

Every draft features steep dropoffs in talent, especially towards the top. Most drafts only produce around 20 NBA players and even fewer stars. In many classes, the gap between the first and third-ranked prospects may be wider than the 20th and 40th-ranked ones. Tier systems help combat this by grouping prospects into segmented, fluid groups, but vertical rankings lack necessary context.

There are no single correct criteria to order prospects. Should we rank players based on their ceilings, floors, median outcomes or some combination of both? Some prospects simply won’t be logical fits for some teams. 

Take Khaman Maluach and Liam McNeeley for example: Maluach sits at sixth overall on my vertical board and McNeeley sits at 20th. But for a contending team without a need for a high-ceiling big man would certainly prefer McNeeley even if he’s a lower-value prospect in a vacuum.

I created my Horizontal Big Board to combat these faults of traditional draft rankings, inspired by NFL Draft positional boards and work from brilliant scouts like PD Web. The board aims to categorize prospects by projected role and archetype to better understand a class’s strengths and weaknesses. Here’s my current horizontal board, filled out to match my current top 75 prospects:

i updated my horizontal board with my current top 75ish prospects. have quite a few names i’m meaning to catch up on that might be missing (fleming, raynaud, stirtz etc)

always love this exercise to help visualize the strengths and weaknesses of a class pic.twitter.com/fV6miJaqmY

— ben pfeifer (@bjpf_) December 20, 2024

Explaining the horizontal board

The colors match the loose tier breaks on my vertical board. I broke these prospects down into eight categories based on their projected offensive and defensive NBA roles, each explained below with current examples. Not every prospect fits cleanly into one category, but I do my best to capture as many roles as possible without creating 20 different archetypes.

Initiator PG – Primary initiators who bend defenses and run their team’s offenses.

• Damian Lillard, Jalen Brunson, Trae Young

Combo PG – Guards who can slide between on and off-ball roles, usually lacking some on-ball creation traits and thriving as off-ball scorers or secondary creators.

• Darius Garland, Zach LaVine, Austin Reaves

Off-ball Guard – Guards who excel playing off of other initiators, often great shooters or defenders.

• De’Anthony Melton, Isaiah Joe, Nickeil Alexander-Walker

Pure Wing – Closest to a traditional “small forward,” wings who live on the perimeter but aren’t skilled enough to be guards.

• Jaylen Brown, Royce O’Neale, Quentin Grimes

Off-Ball Wing/Forward – Wings and forwards who thrive as play finishers with the size to play the three or the four.

• Lauri Markkanen, Paul George, Trey Murphy

Wing Handler – Taller players who often defend wings/forwards but want the ball in their hands.

• Luka Doncic, Jayson Tatum, Jalen Johnson

Smallball Big — Shorter centers without the perimeter skills to live on the wing or defend the paint full time.

• Draymond Green, Brandon Clarke, Trayce Jackson-Davis

True Center — Traditionally sized, taller big men who project to play the five at the NBA level because of their size, interior defense or lack of perimeter skill.

• Brook Lopez, Walker Kessler, Jarrett Allen

Evaluating the 2025 draft

Returning to the 2025 horizontal board, what can we learn about this class? It’s immediately evident that the class is loaded with guard talent at the top. Half of my top 14 ranked prospects fall into one of the three guard categories. The other half of the lottery consists of three bigs and four wings. This makes sense given the scarcity and value of high-end wing and center talent in the NBA, and the relative abundance of guard play.

Wing-needy teams picking high in the draft will either need to snag a top pick to land Cooper Flagg or Ace Bailey (based on current projections). But the class is incredibly deep with wing talent, throughout the first round and into the second round. Prospects like Nique Clifford, Egor Demin and Darrion Williams all represent intriguing bets as scoring or connecting wing handlers. Teams searching for more traditional wing shooters or defenders could snag Alex Karaban, Koby Brea or Drake Powell later in the draft.

Of the 27 prospects I consider likely first-round talents (blue, pink and red tiers), just five of them are bigs. This isn’t the deepest center class, with many of the best center prospects all with notable problems. Queen and Murray-Boyles are both short for a center, a weakness we’ve seen hamstring players like Jalen Duren and Onyeka Okongwu. Maluach boasts immense physical upside but still is quite raw. 

I’ll continue to update this board throughout the cycle and likely tweak the categories to fit my ever-evolving scouting process. Hopefully, laying out prospects this way can help us visualize draft classes in a more holistic manner.