The Athletic

It’s time to set the stage for the 2022 NBA Draft as the season gets fully off the ground this month. International teams have started playing competitive games. College teams have started practicing. Pro days have occurred at Memphis, Nebraska and other universities. The G League Ignite and Overtime Elite have set a portion of their schedules and started training. This thing is about to gear up in an enormous way. In that vein, it’s worth noting that NBA teams are going to have to cast an extremely wide net this year to find talent. There is much more uncertainty regarding this draft class than any in recent memory, in large part because this is the class that will be most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of losing summer basketball developmental time as well as evaluation opportunities for scouts to discover exactly where their games are. On top of that, the 2021 recruiting class is a bit weaker overall than many others that have come through in recent years. (That also stands to be true for the 2022 class for the most part, as we’re about to have back-to-back questionable classes of American prospects in the grand scheme.) Teams have real questions about how much depth there will be in this class. And on top of that, most of the elite prospects this class has to offer are bigs in an era where there are fewer places for bigs on NBA rosters than ever before.