Fantasy Basketball Draft Guide 2025: Center Tiers

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  • By Mike Passador

    Last Updated on October 14, 2025 6:25 pm by Mike Passador | Published: October 14, 2025

    We all consult fantasy rankings in the lead up to draft day and lean on them in the drafts themselves. That’s the name of the game in a lot of ways, and finding rankings you trust (and tweaking them with your own knowledge) puts you way ahead of the competition. But rankings are static, and a draft room is anything but. You need to adapt to the draft as it unfolds, and the context around each pick changes each player’s value to you as a manager. Say, for example, that the rankings lead you to Trae Young and Tyrese Maxey with your first two picks. The third time you’re up, LaMelo Ball and Jalen Brunson are on top of your rankings. Are you actually going to grab that third PG and build the rest of your roster around middle-round talents, or are you going to spread the wealth?

    That’s where tiers come in.

    The general idea is that by putting players into tiers, you can group different guys together to establish ballpark value ranges. If you’re stuck between a guard and a center you both like, but the center is the last of his tier while there are four or five more similarly valued guards on the board, it makes your choice a little clearer. In the first couple of rounds, set rankings should do the job. After that, relying on tiers and the fluidity they allow opens up a lot of doors and helps set the table for level-headed decisions.

    We’ll explain what we think each tier is, highlight any notable names in each and then, for the lower tiers, shout out a player who is most likely to jump up a level or two. Keep in mind that the names in these tiers are not displayed in any particular order. Just because Bam Adebayo, Jalen Duren and Myles Turner appear one after the other does not necessarily mean we rank Bam ahead of Duren and Duren ahead of Turner — that’s what a standard rankings list would show, but that’s not what we’re doing here. It’s placing all three into a bucket that says they should produce similarly and can all be considered in a certain range of the draft.

    You’re not a monorail — you can deviate from the rankings and tiers as much as you like! This is just how we see the field. Treat the tiers as guardrails when it comes to drafting. It’s all about extracting value from your picks, and if you can use the tiers to get ahead of, avoid or exploit positional runs, you’ll be better off for it.

    Our Forward Tiers can be found right here!

    Our Guard Tiers can be found right here!

    Tier 1

    The elite of the elite. This is the no-brainer, can’t miss tier of guys who are going to be taken at the top of drafts.

    You know who it is: Victor Wembanyama and Nikola Jokic. Which one you pick is totally up to your personal preference. If you’re lucky enough to get the first pick in a draft, then you’ve got an elite building block. If you land No. 2, your decision gets made for you but you still end up with a dominant talent. Not a bad outcome. These two are so good that third-round reversals are becoming common, which speaks to their level of output.

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    October 14, 2025, 6:23 pm