Upperclassman Fallacies: The Names Not to Overthink in the 2025 NBA Draft
In NBA Drafts of the past and present dominated by youth and potential, upperclassmen and upperclassman-aged prospects have gotten a misunderstood, if not bad rap.
Beginning in the mid ‘90s, but really taking hold by the early 2000s, the NBA decidedly shifted toward selecting more and more young players in the NBA Draft as opposed to multi-year college veterans. Fast forward to the present and one will find that it isn’t uncommon for half, if not well over half of the entire first round of the draft to be composed of players under the age of 21. Looking at the very top of the draft, in the past 15 years, only two #1 overall picks have been at or over the age of 20 on draft night: Blake Griffin in 2009 and Anthony Bennett in 2013. All other #1 overall picks in that same time frame were selected at 19 years old or younger.
Purely to continue illustrating how hesitant NBA teams are to select older players in the draft, one will see similar trends even when looking at the broader scope of lottery picks. In the past ten drafts, a grand total of (fittingly) 21 players at or over the age of 21 were selected by an NBA team in the lottery. In other words, 21 out of 140 total lottery selections (only 15%) were 21 years or older. If one were to bump the qualifying threshold up to 22 years old, that figure would be even smaller.
The mission of this conversation I’m about to take you through isn’t to play Moneyball, crunch numbers, or to otherwise analyze older prospects’ outcomes of years past in the league. Frankly, there’s already a good amount of this type of thorough, data-driven content already available for the public to read. Rather, I want to treat this conversation as a higher-level, more philosophical analysis of why draft evaluators and front offices now overwhelmingly favor younger prospects early in the draft, a few of the fallacies older players occasionally get caught up in, and a few rapid-fire names in the upcoming 2025 NBA Draft who could, but shouldn’t fall victim to some of those fallacies.
The Fallacies
I use the term “fallacy” somewhat loosely here, as all of the following talking points we’ll be breaking down have some level of truth to them. But to better understand why NBA teams tend to be hesitant about older prospects, it’s essential to understand current reasoning as opposed to purely pointing to statistics and outcomes of the past. These fallacies are based on abstract, albeit relatively surface-level philosophies, trains of thought, and some of their related nuances as opposed to more concrete arguments based on specific basketball skills or player attributes.
With that in mind, for the sake of transparency and to more thoroughly analyze each fallacy, I think it’s pertinent to list some of the most relevant philosophical-leaning questions I tend to ask when evaluating prospects regardless of their age (in no particular order):
Approximately how quickly will this player adapt to their immediate NBA role and contribute to winning basketball? Does this time frame align with the current roster and/or the players we’ll be selecting in future drafts?
Will this player’s immediate NBA role require significant skill development on their part? Their future role?
Will this player’s usage or sheer presence in the rotation have positive or negative implications for other players’ current production and/or developmental trajectory?
How much of this prospect’s individual impact is reliant on athleticism? Barring injuries, how sustainable is that athleticism and for approximately how long?
With that out of the way, we’ll now approach the following three fallacies in order from what I deem to be most valid to most flawed.
Older players have a shorter window.
It’s well known at this point that NBA players, regardless of how long their professional careers last, tend to statistically peak in their late 20s to early 30s. From that perspective, it’s easy to pass this off as not being a fallacy at all. After all, if a player begins their career at 22 or 23 years old, that means their statistical peak will (on average) won’t be quite as far in the future as their younger counterparts, meaning they’ll be expected to be more effective in an NBA role earlier than their younger counterparts. So, this is objectively true to some extent. However, even if older prospects tend to peak earlier in their NBA careers and have shorter careers in general, that is not an absolute rule. If an NBA team doesn’t necessarily expect longevity out of an older player they select in the draft, then having a shorter window may not matter much at all. But for NBA teams that are still early enough in their team-building process that longevity is prioritized to some extent in the players they select in the draft, when they are considering drafting an older player, the objective then shifts to determining how that player can be an exception or outlier to the “shorter window” rule.
As top draft prospects have gotten younger and younger, the idea of non-linear development has become more and more prominent. Even among many top-tier prospects who enter the league as teenagers, it’s now almost expected that it could take one, two, or even several full seasons for them to fully adapt to professional basketball. But a similar, albeit undeservingly less-addressed concept, is that a player’s decline isn’t always linear either. This is particularly true when a player’s on-court impact isn’t mostly or solely built on a foundation of athleticism. You’ll see me call back to San Antonio Spurs players of years past because I grew up a fan, so if you ask me, Manu Ginobili remains one of the better examples of this dichotomy between a player’s projected window and actual career length. In his case, it’s worth returning to one of the questions I listed above that I use in my player evaluations:
How much of this prospect’s individual impact is reliant on their athleticism? Barring injuries, how sustainable is that athleticism and for approximately how long?
While Ginobili undeniably leveraged his athleticism, particularly in his early years in the league, it’s worth recalling that despite debuting in the NBA at age 25, he managed to carve out a highly impactful 16-year career (and an All-Star appearance at age 33) leveraging his early experience in international competition, feel for the game, and sheer skill. But even more specifically, it was his patented eurostep, wildly creative driving angles, ability to manipulate defenders, passing, and natural shooting touch (among other skills) that allowed him to have such a long career and that made him the outlier he was. So, while Ginobili’s athleticism was certainly a factor in his success, it wasn’t the factor. This is something to look for in any NBA prospect, but especially older prospects who are beginning their NBA development years ahead of others in their draft class. While it’s undeniably difficult to find such an outlier as Ginobili in the current drafting landscape (being that international players are now so much more rigorously scouted), the main takeaway is this: In short, when evaluating any prospect—but particularly older prospects—when it comes to their potential longevity, skill and feel for the game are king.
Older players don’t make sense for rebuilding teams.
As we noted earlier, only a small percentage of NBA prospects at or over the age of 21 are selected in the lottery, which suggests that the large majority of rebuilding teams simply aren’t interested or eager to select older players with an early first round pick. And to those teams’ credit, if they’re early enough in their rebuilds to the point that they don’t know who their #1 (or even #2) option is for the future, selecting an older player in hopes that they can develop into that caliber of player won’t make much sense in the large majority of cases. That is where the bulk of the truth lies in this otherwise distorted thought.
To imply, however, that there aren’t any situations in which a rebuilding team should select an older player in the draft—even in the top half of the draft—is unreasonable. Determining whether or not rolling the dice on an older player is reasonable, though, comes down to projecting the player’s NBA role, immediate impact, and congruence with the team’s timeline. To better illustrate what I mean, let’s call back to another one of the questions I posed earlier:
Approximately how quickly will this player adapt to their immediate NBA role and contribute to winning basketball? Does this time frame align with the current roster and/or the players the team will be selecting in future drafts?
In several ways, strategic team building comes down to good timing just as much as anything else. For teams who have recently selected a player in the draft who they believe will be their cornerstone primary option in the future, or even for teams who anticipate selecting that player in the very near future, good timing is especially important. For teams who are already building around that cornerstone, it’s important to limit, if not completely avoid taking too many big swings on low-floor players who could fall flat and essentially turn into wasted picks. On the other hand, though, for teams that are still searching for their franchise player but may not be in a position to draft them for another season or two, in the meantime, it’s important to select a player(s) in the draft who have the upside to warrant a high pick, but won’t necessarily be impactful enough as a rookie or sophomore to prevent the team from bottoming out, particularly if the team isn’t convinced that player can be their primary option.
To call back to the Spurs to better illustrate this concept, third-year forward Jeremy Sochan strikes me as a good example of a team making a smart long-term investment without sacrificing the team’s short-term ability to bottom out for a top-tier prospect (Victor Wembanyama in the following draft). Some will be quick to point to the at-the-time 21-year-old, now NBA All-Star Jalen Williams, who was selected three picks after Sochan in the 2022 NBA Draft, as the “what if” pick for the Spurs. And while the idea of Williams and Wembanyama sharing the court is undeniably riveting, it’s worth recalling the construction of the Spurs going into the 2022-’23 regular season and just how close the race to the bottom was in the ‘23 Draft.
Going into the ‘22 offseason, Dejounte Murray was still with the Spurs and was coming off his first All-Star selection. Keldon Johnson had already emerged as a valuable NBA role player and Devin Vassell was on the back burner ready to do the same, if he hadn’t already done so to some extent. Even Jakob Poeltl had proven himself to be a valuable NBA center at that point. Even after Murray was traded, the Spurs roster that featured the latter three players and Sochan was good enough to be tied with the Charlotte Hornets for the third worst record in the league, and that was with Vassell missing two full months of action after undergoing knee surgery. There is a significant chance that even something as seemingly insignificant as swapping Sochan with the more NBA-ready Williams could have been enough to knock the team out of contention for the #1 overall pick, especially considering how undervalued Williams was as a prospect in retrospect. That’s even more true had Vassell stayed healthy that season or had the Spurs been unable to find a trade partner for Murray. Sochan had and still has significant upside of his own, particularly as a connective off-ball player on offense and “psycho” wing defender on the other end of the floor, to quote Wembanyama. But the plan was never for him to be a primary, secondary, or perhaps even tertiary offensive option on offense, especially in his first few years in the league.
While the Spurs may not serve as the best example of a team who could have been a good suitor for an older prospect like Williams at that time, however, looking back on the 2022 Draft, I see three teams who all (again, in retrospect) could have significantly benefited from selecting him but instead chose to select younger players or prioritize financial flexibility: the Indiana Pacers, New Orleans Pelicans, and New York Knicks. The Pacers, to their credit, were still early in their rebuild around newly acquired guard Tyrese Haliburton, and Bennedict Mathurin was and still is a very good young player in his own right. The Knicks, who originally held the 11th overall pick, made trades on draft night in an effort to clear cap space, which likely helped to eventually facilitate their trade with the Toronto Raptors for OG Anunoby. The New Orleans Pelicans, however, who already had their franchise cornerstone in Zion Williamson, two good-quality veterans in Brandon Ingram and CJ McCollum, and a trio of younger, emerging players in Trey Murphy III, Herb Jones, and Jose Alvarado, certainly could have afforded to take an early swing on the 21-year-old, game-ready Williams. But instead, the team went with a younger, rawer Dyson Daniels in the draft, just to trade him after two seasons for a player the organization saw as more polished in Dejounte Murray. So, were the Pelicans still in the midst of a rebuild at that point? Yes. But would an older prospect like Jalen Williams still made sense for them from a team-building perspective? Also yes.
Older players have less upside.
This final fallacy, in my opinion, requires the least amount of deep analysis because it’s simply the most flawed of the three talking points listed here. While one won’t necessarily hear this opinion said outright, when considering the two previous fallacies in conjunction with one another, there is a bit of an unspoken implication in draft circles that essentially boils down to the belief that older draft prospects inherently possess less upside, whether it’s because of their age in and of itself, because they often have shorter careers with lower peaks, or because rebuilding teams hold the opposite belief that younger players inherently possess more upside. Again, to analyze this point, I’ll call back to a pair of my evaluatory questions:
Will this player’s usage or sheer presence in the rotation have positive or negative implications for other players’ current production and/or developmental trajectory?
Will this player’s immediate NBA role require significant skill development on their part? Their future role?
When discussing a given player’s upside, some evaluators tend to think of that upside in a vacuum and in terms of sheer quantity as opposed to the likelihood that upside is actually realized by the player. You’ll hear evaluators say “[x player] has [this much] upside,” or “[x player] has All-NBA upside,” or “[x player] has elite role-player upside,” or something else to that effect. And while these assessments aren’t necessarily wrong or bad, they tend to lack much, if any context on their own. Upside cannot and should not be evaluated in a vacuum because players’ situations in the context of their teams almost always matter to some extent. Moreover, this is true for any draft prospect, regardless of age. A 21-year-old prospect who has the upside to be an elite catch-and-shoot, 3-and-D wing in the NBA could have a much better chance of fulfilling that upside if he’s placed in a situation where he’ll have that kind of a role from day one in the league and will only sparingly be required to take on a heavier load. If that same 21-year-old prospect is placed in a situation where he’s being asked to regularly create his own offense off the dribble, however, that could lead to growing pains. Putting players through early growing pains can have some long-term benefits in specific situations (see: the Spurs’ experiment with Jeremy Sochan at point guard), but because younger prospects have the luxury of more time, they are generally seen as the more worthwhile prospects compared to their older counterparts if their long-term role requires them to undergo significant development.
While it’s true that some of those younger players tend to have higher individual upside if they can make strides through early growing pains, the difficulty of that “if” is often underrated. It’s the reason we see lottery-level picks with reportedly high upside continue to “bust” and why developmental trajectories like those of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, among others, are as rare as they are. What tends to go just as underrated as that “if,” though, is the value of a high-level role player playing a role in the NBA that they are comfortable with from day one.
It’s easy to forget that five-time NBA All-Star and four-time NBA Champion Klay Thompson was selected in the 2011 Draft at 21 years old and was the fourth-oldest player selected in the lottery that year, only being younger than Jimmer Fredette and the Morris twins. While he was seen by evaluators as a player who could fill a role quite well, I think it’s fair to say that few saw him becoming an integral part of a dynasty. In retrospect, Thompson’s draft age was much less important of a factor in the context of the Warriors because he slipped so seamlessly into a role that required him to do many of the same things he was already doing at a high level at Washington State, not to mention playing that role next to a few future Hall-of-Famers. Not only did this likely increase the chance that he would fulfill his individual upside by allowing more gradual, organic growth, but Thompson’s near-immediate effectiveness in his role also significantly raised the Warriors’ floor and ceiling as a group.
The Upperclassmen of 2025
With that discussion out of the way, I think it’s now pertinent to apply some of these lessons to some of the 2025 NBA Draft’s top upperclassman candidates and—spoiler—there are some really good ones. We’ll take a bit of a rapid-fire approach to these prospects as opposed to full-scale deep dives (for now), so these can be thought of as elevator pitches on why it would be wise not to dismiss them because of their age.
Johni Broome
Center | Auburn
Fifth-year senior Johni Broome is undoubtedly in the running for National Player of the Year in D1 basketball this season and, at one point, was putting up Zach Edey-like numbers in terms of on-court impact. He’s an outstanding rebounder and rim protector despite measuring at only about 6’10”, has passing chops, and has shown more comfort in his jump shot than he ever has in his college career, even if the efficiency from three is down this season. His feel for the game—particularly on defense—is evident whenever he steps on the court, but his offense is nothing to scoff at. At his size, he’s seemingly very comfortable facing up and using some sneakily crafty moves to get to the rim, where he can finish strong above the rim or with soft touch.
By that description, if we didn’t know he was a fifth-year senior, he’d consistently be in lottery or near-lottery conversations. Even when considering his age, though, I’m comfortable labeling him as such anyway. Broome is simply too versatile, too skilled, and too smart not to have some sort of a positive impact at the next level. If a team can snag him as their backup center, he’ll return great value.
Nique Clifford
Wing | Colorado State
Nique Clifford, another fifth-year senior, is nearly just as interesting as Broome. He brings good off-guard size at roughly 6’5” to 6’6”, is a better three-point shooter than this year’s efficiency suggests, is even more efficient around the rim, is a significantly improved passer compared to last season, and can defend up a lineup. He screams NBA-level off-ball utility wing and, like Broome, is likely held back by his age more than anything basketball-related.
Clifford would be best served going to a team whose infrastructure is largely in place already, where he can act primarily as a spot-up shooter that can operate off the bounce on an as-needed basis. His sound, hard-nosed defense will fit in any team construct. While he likely won’t be beating many of the NBA’s best athletes off the bounce, his shooting and sheer versatility gives him a good floor and means of staying on the court, boding well for further development with more experience, particularly as an off-the dribble shooter.
Rasheer Fleming
Forward | St. Joseph’s
At 6’9” with a reported 7’4” wingspan, St. Joseph’s forward Rasheer Fleming likely brings the best size relative to his position out of all the players listed here. He’s also the youngest player on this list despite being a junior, as he’ll turn 21 in the weeks following the draft in early July. His size along with his deceivingly good mobility give him a bit of positional ambiguity that the other prospects listed here simply don’t bring to the table, and on top of that, he’s easily the most efficient scorer of the group. At the time of writing, he’s knocking down 40% of his three-point shots and 64% of his shots from inside the arc. This shooting efficiency along with his defensive production (2.8 STK per game)gives him a relatively safe floor at the next level in terms of skill, but going to a team that will allow him to play most of his minutes at power forward as opposed to a small-ball center or super-sized small forward will best serve him early on. For him to make meaningful strides at the next level, he’ll need to continue improving as a ball handler and passer while minimizing turnovers.
Kam Jones
Guard | Marquette
I’ll be releasing a more detailed deep dive into Kam Jones’ game in the near future, so I won’t spoil too much here, but he’s emerging as the offensive glue guy of offensive glue guys in this draft class. Not only is he pretty clearly the most talented playmaker of every player on this list, but he’s one of few off guards in the class who can be relied upon to hit open catch-and-shoot looks playing off the ball while also taking on primary ball-handling responsibilities and running offense.
What’s more, Jones is a walking paint touch, but rather than relying on sheer athleticism to do it, he uses his underrated craft to create good scoring opportunities for himself at the rim and/or collapse defenses to create open looks for teammates on the perimeter. Jones’ lackluster free-throw shooting is really the only component of his game that currently gives me some pause, but he’s otherwise had such a lengthy history of efficient shooting that it still doesn’t make me too worried about his overall shooting outlook.
Yaxel Lendeborg
Forward | UAB
Former JUCO product and now UAB senior Yaxel Lendeborg has seemingly come out of nowhere this draft cycle, but is likely the only other player on this list outside of Broome that could make a case for being far and away the best two-way player on their team’s roster. He’s been productive in every sense of the word for the Blazers this year, currently averaging 17.6 points, 10.5 rebounds, 4.3 assists, and 3.3 stocks per game with a true shooting percentage of 62%. Lendeborg is an advanced stats darling in general and it’s relatively easy to see why when watching him play.
With all of this considered, it may be Lendeborg’s size in combination with his defensive activity and feel for the game on that end of the floor that makes him such an interesting prospect. While Lendeborg is a solid athlete in his own right, in watching him, I have a hard time believing that he relies on it to remain productive. The only thing missing from his scouting report for now is a consistent three-point shot, but if he can improve as a shooter through conference play, considering his somewhat strong free-throw shooting, I’d expect him to skyrocket up big boards and mock drafts.
Honorable Mentions: Alex Karaban - Forward | UConn; Ryan Kalkbrenner - Center | Creighton; Chaz Lanier - Guard | Tennessee; Igor Milicic - Forward | Tennessee