The finish line is in sight, folks. The 2023 NBA Draft is now just days away, and so to celebrate the special occasion, today — as we do every year — we’re releasing the final CBS Sports Prospect Rankings comprised from a consensus of our staff’s rankings.
Our final Top 90 is an effort to smooth out outlier views and to paint a broad picture from a high-level perspective of what we think of this class with rankings from yours truly, CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish, Matt Norlander, David Cobb, and Colin Ward-Henninger as well as 247Sports’ Adam Finkelstein. Not everyone had the same rankings, of course, and there were some experts that were higher and lower on certain prospects — which we will get to below — but the goal is to give insight and analysis for how we as a staff are thinking of the 202 NBA Draft Class.
Generally speaking, much of our staff thinks of the class in the same way — Victor Wembanyama was the consensus No. 1 and Brandon Miller and Scoot Henderson were consensus top-four talents — but everyone comes at the game from a different perspective and thus can view players either much higher or much lower than the rest. (Norlander, for instance, ranked Duke’s Dereck Lively II as a top-three talent. We’ll let him explain his rationale below.)
Final CBS Sports consensus Big Board Top 10
RKPLAYERSCHOOLYEARPOSHT1Victor WembanyamaFrance-C7-42Scoot HendersonG League Ignite-PG6-23Brandon MillerAlabamaFrSF6-94Amen ThompsonOvertime Elite-SF6-65Cam WhitmoreVillanovaFrSF6-66Ausar ThompsonOvertime Elite-SF6-67Jarace WalkerHoustonFrPF6-78Anthony BlackArkansasFrPG6-69Taylor HendricksUCFFrPF6-810Gradey DickKansasFrSF6-6
You can find the complete consensus Big Board on the NBA Draft Prospect Rankings page
Norlander: Why Dereck Lively II is my No. 3
Head on over to my annual big board mock draft to get more of a sense of where I’m coming from on this. It’s key to know I’m projecting LONG-TERM. I have the Duke one-and-doner third on my big board because I think he has a healthy chance at having the third-best career of any player in the 2023…
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