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The Brooklyn Nets head into the 2025 NBA Draft with four first-round picks that they could potentially use to bring plenty of young talent to the team for the 2025-26 season. Brooklyn did not get the outcome they were hoping for as they ended up with the eighth overall pick in the Draft, but the front office is confident in being able to find impact players in this class.
“This year’s draft is going to have foundational players at the top, but also the depth of the draft and the versatility of the players in the draft gives us a lot of excitement that we can find a lot of good players for us to move forward with,” Nets assistant general manager BJ Johnson during Episode one of “SCOUT.” SCOUT is a project put on by Brooklyn’s content team to show the process that the team is using leading up to the Draft.
“The draft is so unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen. Picks get traded, players get traded,” Johnson continued. “Situations change constantly so you have to approach the draft the exact same way: gathering all the intel, being able to understand who a player is for your organization. A case study for us was this past year’s draft, where we didn’t have a pick.”
Even though the cream of the crop for this Draft is Duke forward Cooper Flagg, teams like the Nets will have to figure out how to work around that if they are going to have a productive time. It seems that most mock drafts are projecting Brooklyn to take Duke forward Kon Knueppel with the eighth overall pick, a player that is considered a “safe” pick by Flagg.
Knueppel doesn’t have the upside of someone like Flagg, but as Johnson said, nobody ever knows what’s going to happen in or after a draft until some time passes. With reports that the Nets are expected by other teams to attempt to trade up in the Draft, Brooklyn will have to keep all options open as they head into one of the biggest summers in recent franchise history.
