The 2022 NBA Draft is fast approaching. After months of games, workouts and last month’s Draft Combine evaluating every facet of every prospect, we are in the stretch run of the draft evaluation process. The Combine is complete, the prospect list is (nearly) set as college players decided by June 1st whether or not to stay in the draft, and teams are churning through individual workouts to get final tidbits of information to help the decision-making process.
With only two teams left alive from the 2021-22 season NBA decision-makers are able to dig deep with their scouting departments on the available prospects. As they, and we, watch tape, evaluate the statistics and project the future, the ranking of the available players will change, likely right up until the night of the draft.
With the NBA Draft less than 3 weeks away, it was time for a new Big Board. Here are the top 30 players in the 2022 NBA Draft.
Let’s look at where things stand for now among the top thirty prospects in the draft. It should be noted that the prospects flatten out quickly this year; there are some clearcut elite talents to choose from early, but somewhere around the 12-15th pick starts something of one large tier; players ranked 15th on one team’s board could be ranked 45th on another’s, and they won’t necessarily have wildly different evaluations of that player.
What follows is my personal draft board, not tied to the Cleveland Cavaliers‘ or any team’s draft boards. It’s not a mock draft; the next one of those will be out Monday. These are merely the top thirty prospects in the 2022 NBA Draft, evaluated on a random team rather than a specific one. We start with the consensus top three and will go through the first 30 players.