NBA Draft Big Board 1.0: Three players in the top tier

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Paolo Banchero, Duke Blue Devils and Chet Homgren, Gonzaga Bulldogs. Photo by Lance King/Getty Images /

New information for the 2022 NBA Draft is in short supply right now. The college basketball season is over. The NCAA Tournament Champion has been crowned. Most overseas leagues have concluded play. The G League Ignite and Overtime Elite have wrapped things up.

In a few weeks, many of the top prospects will arrive in Chicago for the NBA Draft Combine, providing the next wave of information to process. For now, the relative quiet allows for the perfect time to order one’s thoughts on this draft class.

The 2022 NBA Draft class is packed with talented prospects. In laying out the top 30, three players stand above the rest to form Tier 1 in our Big Board 1.0

What follows is the 2022 NBA Draft Big Board 1.0, a ranking of the top 30 players in the class, with short blurbs on each to provide an overview of what each player offers an NBA team. In the coming weeks, this order is sure to change, as the tape is evaluated, some players return to school and others show out at the NBA Combine and in workouts. We will also dive deeper into evaluating each player, both in future iterations of this article and elsewhere on the website.

For now, however, this is an excellent starting place. When looking at the 2022 NBA Draft, a class of prospects being maligned for a lack of stars and a lack of starters, you will see a large number of wings and forwards, the league’s most valuable commodities. That could lead to this class being better than many expect.

We’ll lay the class out in tiers, starting at the very top. Three players encompass that top group on this Big Board; which of the consensus top-4 gets left out?