Redrafting the 2025 NBA Draft: Derik Queen moves into top 10, Liam McNeeley makes big jump after summer league
Between the final pick of the 2025 NBA Draft last month and the final few games of NBA Summer League this week, we've seen a sample size of this year's rookies that, I'll freely admit, is far too small to draw any sweeping conclusions from. But here's the thing: that won't prevent me from reacting -- and perhaps overreacting -- to what we've seen thus far in the last month.
So as Summer League wraps this week in the NBA, I'm running one final first-round mock back for the 2025 with an option for teams, if given the luxury, to re-do their selections. Some -- like the Dallas Mavericks with Cooper Flagg, and the top six teams for that matter -- stood pat. Others, though, used this re-roll to go different directions.
It's a fun exercise to see just how differently the draft might've looked if a few teams navigated off the path they ultimately chose, and even moreso an exercise to show how perception around some players has already changed around players. My biases are liable to bleed in here and be colored by my own player evaluations, to be clear. So some of these picks are shaded by my player evals and by how I viewed the team's decisions at the time of the draft. But this is not a look at what I would do if I were the GM for each team.
Instead, just to again reiterate, this is what I think I think each team would and should do if handed a second-chance at their picks. For the purposes of this exercise, each trade made on draft night was implemented so each team in the mock below is given a chance at making new selections.
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