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Fantasy Basketball 2025 1st-Round Mock Draft and Best Team Names

Zach BuckleyOct 14, 2025

The opening tip of the 2025-26 NBA season will soon be tossed, and fantasy basketball drafts are coming even faster.

Hopefully, you're at the pre-draft preparation point of tweaking and fine-tuning your strategy. Maybe you're even set on player rankings and draft priorities, and now you're just thinking about the best team names possible.

No matter where you find yourself, though, you should find something of value here. After running through a mock first round, we'll tier the players who deserve draft consideration in that range. Finally, we'll close with some of our favorite team names, in case your creative juices haven't started flowing yet.

1st-Round Mock Draft

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This 12-team, one-round, categories mock draft was compiled with the mock draft simulator from FantasyPros.

Nikola Jokić, C, Denver Nuggets
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, G, Oklahoma City Thunder
Victor Wembanyama, C, San Antonio Spurs
Luka Dončić, G, Los Angeles Lakers
Giannis Antetokounmpo, F, Milwaukee Bucks
Domantas Sabonis, C, Sacramento Kings
Anthony Edwards, G, Minnesota Timberwolves
Cade Cunningham, G, Detroit Pistons
Anthony Davis, F, Dallas Mavericks
Karl-Anthony Towns, C, New York Knicks
Trae Young, G, Atlanta Hawks
Devin Booker, G, Phoenix Suns

Tiers of the 1st Round

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The Elites

While draft orders may different a bit, most will start with these four players in some order: Jokić, Gilgeous-Alexander, Wembanyama and Dončić. If this is how you start laying your foundation, you're already in a great spot.

Jokić is a nightly triple-double threat with strong shooting rates at every level. Gilgeous-Alexander is the reigning scoring champion who's a plus-contributor in every category. Wembanyama is already a strong scorer, rebounder and shot-blocker, and he has a chance to grow his field-goal percentage and assists average. And then there's Dončić, whose commitment to conditioning could cut down on his absences while upping his overall impact.

The Giannis Tier

OK, so this maybe isn't the most cleverly named group, but it's accurate. Once those first four are off the board, Antetokounmpo should have a tier all to himself.

Some might want to elevate him into that elite tier, but his struggles at the foul line should put him a half-step behind it. He's just a career 69.3 percent shooter at the stripe, and last season he shot a career-worst 61.7 percent. And considering how often he's at the line (11.1 attempts per outing over the past three seasons), that's a really hard average to overcome with the rest of your roster.

The Rising Stars

This mock draft didn't follow our preferred order, which puts Edwards and Cunningham in their own group behind Antetokounmpo.

Clearly, this isn't a universally held opinion, but you're getting gobs of established stats with realistic chances of improvement. Edwards and Cunningham are both 24 years old. As great as they've been to this point, it's entirely possible—and arguably probable—that we haven't seen their best yet.

The Go-With-Your-Gut Group

If our preferred draft order holds for the first seven picks, your options really start at No. 8. There are a bunch of candidates for that spot, but there isn't a clear-cut choice among them, so you're ultimately relying on your hunches and perhaps the kind of roster you're hoping to build.

If you're confident you can find defensive stats later, you could go with an offensive compiler like Sabonis, Towns, Young, Booker or James Harden. If you want those defensive stats from a talented two-way player, you're going to have to absorb some injury risk with a player like Davis, who's basically a standout in everything—other than availability.