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Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
2025 NBA Draft: Ranking the best forwards, featuring consensus No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg
Let's run down the top prospects in the 2025 NBA Draft by position. Here are the best forwards in the class. You can also find the entire Big Board, plus a full two-round mock draft and scouting reports for every single prospect, in the 2025 NBA Draft Guide. Height: 6-8 • Weight: 221 • Class: Freshman • Age: 18.5 Advertisement Flagg is a do-it-all forward who hustles like a madman, makes his teammates better as a passer, and has dialed in a knockdown jumper. He's both the best offensive and defensive prospect in this draft class, making him the safest No. 1 pick in ages. It's his growth as a shot creator that will decide if he reaches his All-Star floor or soars to his Hall of Fame ceiling. (Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration) Height: 6-8 • Weight: 203 • Class: Freshman • Age: 18.8 Bailey is a ridiculous shot-making machine, capable of splashing contested jumpers from every spot on the floor and with the swagger of a throwback bucket-getter. But his raw edges as a shot creator and defender need sanding down to turn him into a full-on star. Height: 6-7 • Weight: 239 • Class: Sophomore • Age: 20 Advertisement Murray-Boyles operates like a defensive savant the way he locks down every position, uses his ninja-quick hands to swipe at the ball, and inhales rebounds. He's a special defensive presence, and offensively he's a bulldozer finisher with a playmaking feel. Improving his jumper would move him out of tweener territory and into All-Star status. Height: 6-9 • Weight: 198 • Age: 18.5 Essengue is a toolsy forward with a fluid handle, dynamic finishing package, and highly versatile defense. But his long-term upside hinges on the jumper clicking. And if it doesn't, his defense must reach a level that prevents coaches from keeping him off the floor. Height: 6-7 • Weight: 215 • Class: Freshman • Age: 19.5 Advertisement Bryant is a rangy, athletic forward who projects as a highly versatile defender. And though he's raw as a ball-handler, he's a skilled spot-up shooter and a hyper-aware cutter. At a minimum, he has the baseline skills to be a great role player with the upside to someday be much more. You can find the entire Big Board, plus a full two-round mock draft and scouting reports for every single prospect in the 2025 NBA Draft Guide.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
2025 NBA Draft: Ranking the top wing prospects, including Duke's Kon Knueppel
Let's run down the top prospects in the 2025 NBA Draft by position. Here are the best wings in the class. You can also find the entire Big Board, plus a full two-round mock draft and scouting reports for every single prospect, in the 2025 NBA Draft Guide. Height: 6-5 • Weight: 219 • Class: Freshman • Age: 19.9 Advertisement Knueppel brings more than just a sharpshooter's stroke thanks to his brainy pick-and-roll playmaking and crafty scoring feel. He's got a slick midrange bag and strength scoring inside, but to become a player that takes over games he'll need to overcome his average athleticism. (Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration) Height: 6-4 • Weight: 193 • Class: Freshman • Age: 19.9 Edgecombe is an explosive, high-motor wing who flies out of nowhere for poster dunks and chase-down blocks. He pairs his elite athleticism with a knockdown spot-up jumper and fearless slashing, though he needs to improve his shot creation to become more of a primary creator. Height: 6-6 • Weight: 213 • Class: Senior • Age: 21.8 Advertisement Coward has gone from a Division III player to a potential first-round pick in just a few years behind his rapid development into a prospect with a valued 3-and-D skill-set. But he brings even higher upside thanks to his passing vision. Height: 6-7 • Weight: 215 • Class: Freshman • Age: 19.7 McNeeley is a sharpshooting wing with superb instincts moving without the ball, and the touch to splash from deep ranges. Though he doesn't project as a primary shot creator, his feel as a connective passer gives him the skill to fit into any type of offense. Height: 6-6 • Weight: 200 • Class: Freshman • Age: 19.8 Advertisement Powell has a chiseled frame that he uses to barrel into defenders at the rim and to contain opponents when he's on defense. He's a switch-everything defender who plays with a high motor, and if his spot-up jumper translates he checks all the boxes to be a 3-and-D role player at a minimum. You can find the entire Big Board, plus a full two-round mock draft and scouting reports for every single prospect, in the 2025 NBA Draft Guide.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
NFL 2025 team previews countdown: From No. 32 Tennessee Titans to No. 1 ... ?
The 2025 NFL season will be here before you know it. It starts with training camps in July and the Hall of Fame Game on July 31. As anticipation builds, catch up on everything you need to know with Frank Schwab's team previews countdown. A new preview will drop every weekday (except July 4) as we get closer to the Detroit Lions facing the Los Angeles Chargers in Canton, Ohio. Who will be No. 1 going into the season? Where will your team rank? Here's your guide for all the answers. Click on below to jump to that team, then click on the team name to read the full preview. No. 32 Titans No. 31 Saints No. 30 Browns (Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports) A 3-14 season was a wake-up call. The Tennessee Titans not only fell to the bottom of the NFL, they slid deep into obscurity. Tennessee was truly awful but other than regular Will Levis memes and first-year head coach Brian Callahan's outward hostility toward Levis, nobody cared. They had no identity, no marketable star, a decayed roster and only one hope for the future. That hope was the first pick of the draft. The Titans could have traded that pick or taken Travis Hunter or Abdul Carter, but they knew the best path back to relevance was hitting on a pick at quarterback. That's why Cam Ward, who set an NCAA record with 158 touchdown passes at Incarnate Word, Washington State and then Miami, is a Titan. There's a long way to go and Ward won't fix all of that. There were a few bright spots on the roster — Jeffery Simmons is a star on the defensive line, 2024 rookies DT T'Vondre Sweat and CB Jarvis Brownlee Jr. had promising debuts, Tony Pollard and Calvin Ridley had 1,000-yard seasons in a bad situation — but rebuilding will take a while. If Ward hits, at least that's a start. (Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports) The plan for the Saints always seemed to be that when Drew Brees retired, there would be a total teardown. That really didn't happen. It still hasn't happened four years after Brees' last game. The Saints weren't recklessly aggressive as usual this offseason, but didn't blow things up and didn't make moves that would indicate they have the self awareness to know they should be in a rebuild. They still have a terrible 2026 cap situation and one of the oldest rosters in the NFL. Even a brutal 15-game stretch to end the season didn't force them into facing reality. Maybe it needs to get even worse for the Saints to realize they're at rock bottom. And it might. Kellen Moore is a rookie head coach and he does not step into a good situation. Derek Carr retired and while he wasn't great for New Orleans, the remaining quarterback solution is probably second-round pick Tyler Shough, a curious pick for a fading team considering he'll turn 26 years old in September. The surrounding cast has some recognizable names who have had good careers but is short on stars who are still in their prime. The Saints' only blue-chip player under 28 years old might be receiver Chris Olave, but he hasn't played a full season in the NFL due to four confirmed concussions. New Orleans has reached a point in which a horrific season is the best outcome. It would be a wake-up call and perhaps lead to a franchise-changing quarterback. Like the first two games last season, the Saints' idea that they can turn things around doing things the same old way seems to be nothing but a mirage. (Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports) The Cleveland Browns were the last to know that Deshaun Watson was one of the NFL's worst quarterbacks. It had to be cathartic for Browns fans to hear owner Jimmy Haslam say the team "took a big swing and miss with Deshaun." Everyone else knew that long ago. The Browns were in deep denial. A key decision at the top of the draft was the unofficial start of reshaping the roster. The Browns passed on the chance to draft Travis Hunter second overall to get a huge haul from the Jacksonville Jaguars in a trade. It included the fifth overall pick and the Jags' first-round pick next year. It had to be hard to give up Hunter, but it was probably the right move. The big part of the rebuild will be figuring out quarterback, and the Browns are taking a shotgun approach to it this year. They have four relatively low-cost quarterbacks and are praying one is the answer. Joe Flacco is the 40-year-old stopgap, Kenny Pickett is the reclamation project, Dillon Gabriel was the rookie the Browns drafted proactively in the third round, and Shedeur Sanders is the fifth-round pick everyone wants to talk about. If Sanders climbs up from fourth on the depth chart and starts any games this season, the Browns suddenly will become one of the most watched teams in the league. The process starts over. Hopefully for Cleveland it's not as long and difficult as the last one, and with some positive results this time. No. 29: To be revealed Thursday
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
2025 NBA Finals: Why the Oklahoma City Thunder are America's Team
America's NBA team is playing on Thursday — in Game 1 of the NBA Finals. I'm convinced the reason you don't know them as America's team is because they haven't been properly marketed. I just don't see any other plausible reason. I'm talking about the Oklahoma City Thunder. The same Oklahoma City Thunder that were somehow not selected among the 10 marquee teams to play on Christmas Day. The same Oklahoma City Thunder that were scheduled to be on national TV fewer times this season than the Philadelphia 76ers. Advertisement The Oklahoma City Thunder should be an American sensation, yet it feels they're preposterously underexposed. On the NBA's biggest stage, against the Indiana Pacers in the Finals, they deserve your undivided attention. Here are five reasons why: (Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration) 1. They are really good at basketball. Historically good The Thunder had a 68-14 record in the Western Conference which is like 78-4 in Eastern Conference currency. They outscored opponents by 12.7 points every 100 possessions, which was the best net rating in the league and more than 10 full points better than the Pacers' 2.1 figure. But that doesn't even give OKC its proper due. Advertisement To get a better idea of how good this OKC team is, we have to adjust for strength of schedule (i.e. they don't get to play in the East). We can do that by looking at Simple Rating System (SRS), which accounts for opponent strength and can be found on Basketball Reference for every team dating back to 1946. The Thunder's SRS stands at 12.70, which means they are nearly 13 points better than the average team. The team with the best record in the East, the Cleveland Cavaliers, finished at 8.81. Even with Chet Holmgren out for the majority of its games during the regular season, OKC lapped the competition. But to fully understand how good this OKC team is, we can look at the number of teams who have finished a full season at a 12.70 SRS. Here's that list: Oh, wait. Sorry. There isn't a list. Advertisement In 2024-25, OKC had the best SRS in NBA history. A whopping 54 of the Thunder's 68 wins were by double-digits, which included runaway wins over Cleveland, Boston, New York, Indiana, Houston, Denver and the Lakers. To put it plainly, they beat opponents so badly (and lost so sparingly) that they rate, by many advanced metrics, as the best regular-season team in NBA history. But that's not the only reason they should be more familiar by now. 2. The NBA needs to invest in tomorrow There will come a day when LeBron James and Stephen Curry aren't playing in the NBA anymore. No one knows when that day will be, but we know this: The NBA is still all-in on the LeBron and Steph business. The Warriors and the Lakers led the NBA with 29 appearances on national TV, which was 27 percent more than the Thunder, who were chasing all-time records throughout the season. Advertisement As crazy as it sounds, the Thunder were not among the 10 teams picked to play on Christmas Day this season despite being the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference last season and upgrading their depth with Alex Caruso and Isaiah Hartenstein. On the other side, the Pacers weren't showcased on Christmas Day either. As I detailed in a recent Big Number episode, this Finals matchup marks the first time since 2007 that the two conference champions were not selected by the NBA to play on Christmas Day. Unfortunately, the NBA has to figure out what the post-LeBron and post-Steph era looks like, and investing in young great teams like the Thunder is way past due. Going forward, the Thunder should be put front and center. The NBA added several Thunder games to their national TV offering as the season went on, but their national TV count of 23 games still trailed Golden State (29), the Lakers (29), Boston (27) and New York (24) in appearances on ESPN/ABC and TNT. It's not like the Thunder came out of nowhere this year. The Thunder won 57 games last season with the second-youngest roster in the league! They weren't just good; they had staying power. We've never seen a team this young and this good. They may not draw the largest TV ratings today, but it'd be wise to take a little hit on the audience size in the short-term and reap the long-term benefits of having American fans entrenched in Thunder vibes. Speaking of vibes, let's talk about the guy who was just named the league's MVP. 3. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is him I mean, look at the guy. He wears sunglasses at night. He dons giant fur coats inside. I wish I could pull off half the fits he does (or just one). The NBA loves a news-conference fashion icon and SGA certainly delivers. But it's the basketball stuff. My god, the basketball stuff. The way he deftly uses speed and footwork to routinely butcher a five-man defense is sublime. The 26-year-old averaged 32.7 points, 6.4 assists and 5 rebounds while shooting 57.1 percent on 2s and 37.5 percent on 3s. He was once again among the league leaders in steals and a virtuoso in the open court. Advertisement The best way I can put it is this: SGA is at once the hot knife slicing through the stick of soft butter and also the stick of soft butter. If that makes sense. And he's always there. In an NBA beleaguered by stars missing games, he has played in 92 games this season, which is more than Kawhi Leonard and Paul George combined, the power duo that the Clippers assembled by trading away Gilgeous-Alexander to OKC in 2019. He's a throwback and the future at the same time. Sometimes fans just need a star who shows up. He is him. 4. The Thunder play defense like there's no tomorrow A most common complaint about NBA basketball is that teams don't play defense. A) That's not true. B) If you believe that, then you clearly haven't watched OKC. Advertisement I called them the OKC Dobermans on The Big Number for a reason. They're so fast and suffocating that it often feels as if they're playing six-on-five. Of the top seven players in steals per game this season, three of them play for the Thunder: Cason Wallace (1.8 steals), Gilgeous-Alexander (1.7) and Jalen Williams (1.6). It's not fair. No team prioritized possessing the ball more than OKC. Opponents turned it over a league-high 17 times per game, routinely giving the Thunder extra possessions to attack on the other end. This postseason, the Thunder have scored 380 points off of turnovers. No other team has more than 300. The Thunder deeply understand the value of winning the turnover game. They have registered 535 fewer turnovers than their opponents this season, playoffs included. The NBA record before that was 467, per Stathead tracking. They have a chance to smash the all-time record by ONE HUNDRED turnovers. Do you understand what I'm saying? 5. They are homegrown — and about to grow a whole lot more If you're not a fan of the player empowerment era where stars hop from one team to another, I get it. It might be unfamiliar and dizzying to keep up with. And guess what, do I have a team for you. Advertisement GM Sam Presti and the Thunder have put a premium on internal development. They drafted Chet Holmgren (2nd in 2022), Jalen Williams (12th in 2022) and Cason Wallace (10th in 2023). They traded for a 20-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander and paired him with an undrafted free agent named Lu Dort — the two have been chipping away at this since 2019-20 and fought through a 22-50 season together. The team took a chance on a 29-year-old Mark Daigneault in 2014, naming him the head coach of its G League team. Six years later, he was promoted from within and eventually took over for Billy Donovan, becoming the second-youngest head coach in the NBA. Daigneault is now considered one of the league's top coaches, winning Coach of the Year in 2023-24. The organization's biggest signing in free agency this summer, Isaiah Hartenstein, was a G League standout like Daigneault. After a successful stint with the Knicks, Hartenstein was rewarded with a three-year, $87 million contract in OKC, and it's fitting and comical that a backup center is easily the biggest free-agent signing in franchise history. The homegrown roster construction lends itself to some pretty wholesome moments. For instance, the OKC players insist on doing postgame interviews as a team, rather than featuring one individual. However, within the 48 minutes of game action, they let their play do the talking. They have six technical fouls as a team and one of them was on Dort kissing his three fingers after making a 3. Seriously. Advertisement Best of all, it still feels like we're getting in early on the Thunder's rise like it's the second inning of a nine-inning game. They're four wins away from becoming the youngest team to win the championship (average age of 24.7 years old when accounting for minutes played) since the NBA/ABA merger and more elite draft picks are on the way. There is no Right Way To Do It in sports, but the Thunder offer a blueprint for which other non-marquee teams can aspire. Inevitably, the team will get expensive when Holmgren and Williams' extensions come due in 2026, but figuring out how to pay several All-Star-caliber players in two years is a good problem to have. Advertisement The Thunder don't have to worry about that now. They have a Finals matchup with the Pacers on Thursday — which is, thankfully, on national TV. [Editor's note: This story was originally published on Dec. 17 and has been updated.]
