2025 NBA Draft
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. Players who were on two-way contracts to end the season will be identified accordingly (2W), as well as players who enter this offseason as free agents (FA).
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:
