The highly anticipated 2025 NBA draft is now fewer than two months away, and work is being done across the league to evaluate and vet which players teams want to build their franchises around moving forward. The top prize is Duke’s Cooper Flagg, an electrifying talent who’s a clear favorite to come off the board first in late June.
Overall though, the draft pool (at least among college players) is the smallest it has been in a long time. The NBA released its early entry list Tuesday and just 106 players put their names in before becoming auto-eligible, the lowest mark in a decade. While many early entrants in the past have always planned to return to college, it’s still notable seeing so many fewer players interested in going through the pre-draft process. That’s being driven in large part by the huge sums of money available to players who stay in college via NIL deals. Some programs even wrote those NIL contracts contingent on players not testing the draft waters, not wanting to deal with the uncertainty of a top player waiting until late May to decide on returning or not.
