2026
nba
Draft
Guide

Baffling and grotesque as this stinkathon has gotten for the Wizards, their fans have to be looking ahead, down this dark tunnel of misery, and seeing flickering rays of hope for the first time in years. [Someone whispers in my ear that they were in this situation a year ago and lost in the lottery.] FRIENDS! Let’s be positive! Even if Washington falls in the lottery again, it still has a great chance of landing a useful player, and all the suffering this season still gives it a 14 percent chance at no. 1, in what could be the last draft before even that small advantage gets flattened out. If the Wiz do luck into the top pick, they’ll likely be choosing between Dybantsa and Cameron Boozer, as either player should help unlock their current roster, and questions surrounding Darryn Peterson’s dependability still loom. My guess is they’d lean AJ, because he’s the type of charged competitor who could impose his personality onto this franchise while also bringing some physicality and defensive toughness to a roster laden with skinny guards, wings, bigs … more or less everyone. Pairing Dybantsa with the recently surging Will Riley and Bilal Coulibaly would also give them a lot of intriguing options on the wings.

(Also, I know D.C. is building for the future and Trae Young and Anthony Davis are probably just passing through town, but I really want to see them roll out a lineup of Trae, Kyshawn George, Dybantsa, Alex Sarr, and Davis. That would give Young a bunch of lanky, bouncy basketball players to protect against his weakness and highlight his offensive gifts. Come and get 84 on this group, Bam!)

The Pacers are a rare breed at the top of the draft—a team capable of making a “shitty circumstances lead to incredible opportunity” talent snag that can lead to years upon years of cheering … or jeering. Sometimes you end up with Tim Duncan, and sometimes you end up with James Wiseman. The Warriors went awry six years ago by targeting pure upside swings who were clunky philosophical fits. The Pacers could fall into that same trap by selecting Darryn Peterson, who, despite showing some scoring capability on and off the ball, still has a lot to prove after a messy year at Kansas. But Boozer is the player who is best equipped to both support their current timeline and play a key role in whatever comes next. He’s a “right play” machine who adds value all over the court, and he should interface brilliantly with Tyrese Haliburton’s methods. He can serve as a hub with their shooters working around him, as a screening partner for Hali, as a spacer for their other creators, and so on. In my mind, Boozer is ready to do this today. What’s the downside of Boozer? He might not turn out to be the same type of volume scorer as Dybantsa and Peterson but would continue to impact winning at a high level. What a horrifyingly boring outcome!

If they do finally earn some lottery luck this year and land in the top three, the Nets might go with Peterson regardless of which spot they get. It’s still early, but the returns from their 2025 class have been cloudy at best, with the occasional “Hey, that might be something” spurts. This front office needs a big bet to hit big, and Peterson has the kind of superstar-scorer upside that is unmatched in the 2026 draft. Not to mention, his game would pair well with those of Michael Porter Jr. and Nic Claxton and click some things into place. Things can obviously change, but as of this moment, I still have Peterson at the top of my board. He’s the type of offensive catchall that could bring purpose to their casserole of pass-first prospects, and he’d give their bigger and longer athletes enough spoon-fed offense in the pick-and-roll to at least launch the team in a direction.

The Kings are tied in the standings with the Jazz, meaning their ping-pong ball combinations will be subject to a coin flip, but we’ll give the Kings the no. 4 pick for now due to pain and suffering. Would I put it past the RealHooperTM franchise to reach for a potential scoring star like a Darius Acuff Jr. or a Mikel Brown Jr. here? I would not. After all, this is the franchise that went out of its way to deprioritize Tyrese Haliburton, trade for DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine, and then willfully enter into the Russell Westbrook business. Drafting Wilson would be the adult thing to do. Wilson has finer technical details to iron out in several areas of his game, but he has the opportunity to reach heights (literally and figuratively) on the defensive side of the ball that no one else can. He’s also an oddball, bendy, and big forward on the offensive end with shooting upside (eyes right here—don’t google the percentages), and he’s a big-time finisher at the rim. While the Kings’ road toward a reset will undoubtedly be bumpy, Wilson would be something to be excited about.

Surely this will mark the end of the abysmal tanking era of the Utah Jazz, which never amounted to a pick in the top three. Surely! These people have suffered enough! Here’s a stealthy subplot in Burries’s evaluation: Although he played a secondary/tertiary facilitator role for Arizona, he has some quiet upside to play the lead guard spot at some point in the future. For now, he’s the type of ball-hawking defensive player who could check lead handlers so that Keyonte George isn’t forced to, and he could be used in some promising lineup configurations alongside the sheer size that the Jazz have now orchestrated with Jaren Jackson Jr., Lauri Markkanen, Walker Kessler, and jumbo wing Ace Bailey.

The Hawks could use a dose of steady handling, as well as some dynamic shooting gravity, and I doubt they’d go looking for that in the form of a small guard after they just punted on the Trae Young era. Wagler has the kind of positional size that fits Atlanta’s brand of personnel. He’ll have questions to answer—chief among them whether he’s physically capable of shouldering the load as a primary option in the NBA. But even in a supporting role, he is a solid technician as a ball-screen operator and the kind of absolutely knockdown (and highly dynamic) shooter that defenses will have to account for at all times. I think he’d help the Hawks right away.

The Grizzlies win the tiebreaker in this scenario over the Mavs, and if Acuff is available, this big-time backcourt talent could be a nice off-ramp for another point guard–driven era that went up in smoke. Depending on how these picks shake out, Acuff could climb as high as five (and maybe even four), but it’s harder for me to imagine the Jazz or the Hawks signing up for more small scoring guards, and I just personally like Wagler’s fit with Atlanta a bit more. In Memphis, Acuff’s toughness, rock-solid demeanor, and ability to feed high-flying athletes in transition and the half court would make for a fairly seamless baton passing, in terms of team identity, from the previous era.

Once the coveted guys with upside are off the board, the Mavs should have a chance to take aim at one of their issues in Cooper Flagg’s debut season and one of their most important tasks as they prepare for the next era without Kyrie Irving. This team was brilliant when it was running but utterly stagnant in the half court because of its lack of consistent advantage creation and shooting. Obviously, the Mavs would much rather be picking a few spots earlier—Wagler would be a great fit—but Brown is an electric ball handler in open space who can also just as easily rocket off of pin-downs, staggers, and flare screens as a shooter. His strange up-and-down year at Louisville has had a suppressing effect on his value, but he is one of the stealthier star bets in this range. Pairing Brown with a blossoming creator like Flagg could be an ideal developmental setup for him to control how much responsibility he’s given as he polishes the finer details.

Always hard to know what the Bulls are thinking (or if they’re thinking), especially after they finally moved on from Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley this week. But when you look at their roster and see … three essential pieces in Matas Buzelis, Josh Giddey, and Noa Essengue, you could reasonably conclude that they should be thinking talent over anything else. Ament was considered a shoo-in for the top five to seven going into the season but saw subpar shooting efficiencies (both from afar and at the rim) diminish the hopes of what he might be as a floor spacer. Still, Ament has an undeniably special feel and balance for a player of his size, and he is also a plus on defense. Ament would give the Bulls three separate forward-sized creators, each with a slightly different flavor and the versatility to share the floor.

Zach Galifianakis used to have a great stand-up bit where he’d pretend to be “Nathaniel Buckner,” a comedian from 1778. In it, he’d pick up the mic, look at it awkwardly, hit it, and say, “Is this thing on? What is this thing?” That’s how I feel about the Bucks’ roster right now: Is this thing on? What is this thing? Is it a vehicle for Giannis to continue competing at a high level? Doesn’t feel like it! Is it a new design that’s building toward a future driven by other players? Doesn’t feel like it, but this will likely be the first step in that direction. Flemings is characterized as a scorer, but he’s much more than that on offense. He’s shown glimpses of real feel in the pick-and-roll, and in the open court, there isn’t a faster player in this class (save for maybe Stanford’s Ebuka Okorie). If Myles Turner hangs around and they retain this hodgepodge of shooters, Flemings will manufacture open looks for all of them.

Forgive the (painfully predictable) hipster-ass sentence that I am about to write, but: There’s a scene from the end of The Life Aquatic where Steve Zissou slaps a student on the back and goes, “GODDAMMIT, INTERN, YOU’RE GETTING AN A!” That is what I expect Draymond Green will do at some point next season if the Warriors somehow get hold of Philon, who has the moxie, skill set, and intelligence to jump right in and mesh with a team as old and ambitious as the Warriors. He’d be their own version of Rajon Rondo with those late-aughts Celtics teams, blending well with the players they have while also having moments of “This guy might earn the car keys someday.” Gritty as a glass coming out of a dishwasher that needs its filter changed. Gritty as a David Simon procedural drama.

The expectation was that the Trail Blazers would be propelled by their exciting young guards (Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe) by this point, but there’s been a bit of a directional sea change: With Deni Avdija’s All-Star ascendence and Donovan Clingan’s emergence as a legitimate above-average NBA center, Portland has a couple of young building blocks defined by physicality and rim pressure, with some respectable ball skills mixed in. Scoot is still an unknown, but with the deck at no. 12 largely cleared of lead guards capable of changing the circumstances, I could see Portland betting on an athletic off-ball player like Carr, who would add competent movement shooting (41.7 percent on catch-and-shoot 3s) and punchy finishing at the rim while avoiding compromise on the defensive end with his springy weakside contests.

The Heat could probably use another creator/handler, and they have a history of finding undervalued players of that variety in this range, but that might be tough in this scenario: The enticing guard prospects are unlikely to still be on the board, and any potential reaches are likely to come with troublesome questions, like lack of size, lack of efficiency, and so on. It’s likely that they’ll scoop up one of those players in the next round for better value, in typical Miami fashion. Lendeborg is a less saucy proposition, but he’s undeniably multifaceted on offense: He can be a spacer, a passer who could sync with Tyler Herro and Bam Adebayo, and a versatile defender who I would wager is up to the challenge of playing Miami’s brand of two-way basketball.

If the Grizz manage to get two picks in this lottery and nab a new-era culture-setter like Darius Acuff Jr. with the first one, they could target a sturdy producer like Steinbach here. Washington’s hoop squad had a weird go of it this season, but Steinbach managed to be one of its lone bright spots—he gobbled glass like Jim Carrey’s version of the Grinch and racked up one of the more impressive points-in-the-paint repertoires in the country while also flashing the ability to space the floor. He’d give a backbone and lineup flexibility to an org that is trying to push forward.

As per yearly custom, I have to tap-dance out onstage here and tell the crowd that, yet again, the Thunder have too many good young players and that predicting what they might do feels like an impossible task. So many things are on the board in this draft for the defending champs, who by that big night in late June may very well be back-to-back champs and moving pieces around on the margins to loosen their salary cap belt buckle and cycle out talent that is on track to be cost-prohibitive. Might that mean they’ll package a couple of these picks and take a swing in the top 10 or higher? Might that mean they’ll get out completely? Impossible to say at this point, but Sarr’s NCAA tournament run has been like Carter Bryant’s past year, in that he’s looked like a gigantic, switchable perimeter defensive monster who’s capable of knocking down open shots and tearing the rim down when given the chance. It wouldn’t shock me at all if he climbs this high.

As of now, the Hawks and Hornets are as pick-rich in this draft as the Thunder, but they’re still in the process of pinning down the final pieces of their ascending rosters. The Hornets struck gold with the blossoming Moussa Diabaté (antlers up), who bolsters the identity of this team in a number of ways, but Ngongba could take their frontcourt a step further. Ngongba played on colossal half-court teams in both of his years at Duke, and while he produced, he still left many evaluators wondering what he might have looked like in different spacing with faster and more dynamic shooters/handlers around him. With his injury history (he’s had on-again, off-again problems with his feet dating back to high school), the medicals could play a critical part in what his draft range ends up being, but his combination of size and passing sense would insulate the Hornets from the inevitable “rough them up” strategies that teams will test them with, without compromising what has made them so promising.

My friends and I played a lot of Mario Kart in college. (I whooped oceans of ass and probably still could.) Comedy would ensue anytime a particular hot-tempered friend would be in the lead and get hit with the lightning bolt item, which shrunk all the players momentarily. This friend would then repeatedly scream, “GET BIG! GET BIG! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GET BIG!” Why do I remember these things? No idea, but I’d imagine that’s also being yelled in a lot of front offices around the league. The Raptors ain’t exactly soft or scrawny, but they could use a rim protection upgrade, and a gravity-warping 5 like Mara could be an immensely helpful card to play against the more imposing front lines of the league. He anchored one of the most dominant defenses in college basketball this season while posting an astronomical block percentage. He’s also an underrated passer. Bonus: Mara has connections to Toronto’s international-savvy staff.

Stirtz isn’t the type of imposingly explosive or switchable open-space athlete that the Thunder typically go for, but he’s absolutely the type of highly skilled, steady-minded ball handler and decision-maker with strong positional size that they tend to maximize with their player development. I would also tack on “phenomenal shooter” for good measure. Again, odds are good that this pick will move in some capacity—OKC still has two lottery picks from 2024 and 2025 that have barely seen the floor this season. Still, Stirtz would likely eagerly buy into a longer-term plan for his role, even if it meant working his way through OKC’s developmental system for a year. Something that might also help: Bennett grew up a hardcore OKC Thunder fan.

If the Hornets go big with their first selection, Jefferson, who could readily contribute to their existing strengths, would be a tremendous fit here. The 6-foot-9 forward was quite possibly the most creative passing big in the country this past season. He does break some eggs in the process of making his offensive omelets (he can get a little loose with the experimentation at times), but he has fantastic overall feel; one could easily envision him scaling down his usage from a successful Iowa State team and plugging into what the Hornets are doing.

I’m much higher than consensus on Quaintance because I’m willing to look past the oddity that was this past year at Kentucky; he tried to come back too soon after tearing his ACL less than a year earlier. Jayden will force decision-makers to weigh the idea of him against the worry that this injury detour is a sign of things to come. It reminds me of 2017, when OG Anunoby fell to the 23rd pick because of his dubious status after also tearing his ACL. At the 20th slot, a player who I think has the potential to be the most dynamic rim protector in the class (a race between him and Caleb Wilson, in my opinion) is well worth the risk, considering the potential to play him alongside Victor Wembanyama. If that happens, opposing teams might just … never score again?

I could see Evans rising as the predraft process unfolds, possibly even as high as the early 20s, as he does here to a team that could desperately use his combination of size and water-into-wine shotmaking to hydrate some of those dry spells that can occur when Cade Cunningham isn’t able to do everything all the time. Thanks to the speed and height of his release, this 6-foot-6, deadeye, slinky man could prove to be an asset as a screener within the flow of Detroit’s actions; Evans could force defenders to make difficult decisions when he’s popping to the 3-point line and the Pistons’ stable of springy athletes is streaking to the rim.

Anderson, the 6-foot-3 guard who’s on track to be yet another solid member of the German hooping fraternity, was one of the most prolific and reliably productive pick-and-roll players in the country this past season. He was punishingly effective as a pull-up shooter in those actions (40 percent from 3) on huge volume for a college player and just as effective off the catch. It’s hard to say whether Anderson will be much more than a rotation player even in the best-case scenarios, but his skill level is undeniable, and he could bring long-term depth to a team heavy with players in the 3, 4, and 5 slots.

For all of the heartache that Sixers fans felt over the way that the Jared McCain situation was handled and all the Squidward vibes felt while watching him smiling and reveling in his new experience in OKC, it’s time to let go of the past. Allen is a bigger version of that type of player, and one who could help everyone move on. What was it that Hawk Tuah Girl said? “Best way to get over one is to get under another”? Should I not say that here? Maybe I shouldn’t. Anyway, Allen is arguably (and quietly) the most talented connector guard in this class, as well as one of the best decision-makers. He’s got good positional size, his shot is progressing (though it has a ways to go), and he’s the type of player who could supplement whatever Philadelphia wants to do on offense. I think he’d be a big hit.

Seeing as the stewardship of offensive possessions is more or less accounted for in Lakerland for the next several years with Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves piloting the ship, their target should be multifaceted players with low waste and low errors who also play with a high motor and high feel. Haugh is exactly that, although his virtues are so obvious that it’s possible that he won’t be available for Los Angeles here. If he is, the versatile Gator forward should be enough of a spacer, cutter, and passer on offense, and also a dogged worker on defense, to fit what the new leadership is looking for.

There were times when I wondered whether Krivas would ever be an NBA-level player. Although he’s 7-foot-2 with a wide base and long arms, I thought he looked stiff moving side to side on defense and struggled to assert himself and leverage his size on offense. While questions about dropping the hammer as often as he can in traffic as a finisher remain, he showed amazing growth this season and was unquestionably one of the most dominant rim protectors in all of college basketball. Every defensive catchall metric had Krivas at or very close to the top of Division I, and I’ve come to think that he’s on track to be a capable rotation big for a long time at the next level.

Peat exploded out of the gate this season, leading some to wonder whether there’s much of a gap between him and someone like Cam Boozer. But the grind of the season shined a light on some of his scoring methods—he’s an almost exclusively inside-the-arc player at 6-foot-8, and he relies on corkscrew fading jumpers in the paint if he’s not finishing at the rim. Drafting Peat is ultimately a bet on his intangibles and feel. He doesn’t necessarily need his number to be called in order to have a sizable impact, as he amasses points within the creases of an offense and is an exceptional passer for his player type.

Based on the conversations I’ve had, López has a wide draft range, but I’ve never gotten the sense that he will fall into lottery territory. That could change, but as of now, the situation has a “slide” vibe—which could benefit a team like Boston that tends to pounce on undervalued perimeter pieces and develop them into highly serviceable players. López played in a supporting role for a flawed and mediocre New Zealand Breakers team this past season, which didn’t exactly put him in the best position to shine. His combination of bona fide NBA perimeter size and general feel for the game could really progress with some time and the type of tutelage that the Celtics have shown they’re capable of giving.

The Wolves could, yet again, use some credible backcourt depth. The trauma of the Rob Dillingham experiment (I’ll raise my hand and take an L on that one) will likely dissuade them from going to the undersized lead guard well again, which makes me think Vanderbilt’s Tyler Tanner, Texas Tech’s Christian Anderson, or someone else with some size will be the move. Size and shooting are always helpful for a team with a proven (albeit flaky) identity on offense, and despite an uncharacteristically bumpy year from 3, Mullins projects to be valuable in that area.

Unless there’s a gift-from-the-heavens type of free-falling prospect at this point in the draft, I have a hard time seeing the Cavs taking any kind of developmental bet. For a team that is trying to get its contending ball over the goal line, ready-to-roll pieces like Johnson are essential. As we saw throughout this past college season, if there’s one side of the game that he’s prepared to jump into and participate in at a high level, it’s defense. Johnson’s frame and physicality could bolster Cleveland’s frontcourt depth and give it some options if/when (probably when, let’s be honest) one of its lanky and springy bigs isn’t on the floor.

If this pick conveys to the Mavs, it could be tempting to take a second swipe at adding some speed in the first round. Okorie, perhaps the most violent dribble separator and the most undeniable downhill driver in the class, would fit the bill. The Okorie chatter has gone from a whisper a few months ago to “This dude is actually good and should be much higher” now, but he could also head back to school if a spot in the first round doesn’t seem like a sure bet. The tempting tide of NIL money has put the entire second round underwater, and it’s now slowly creeping up into the first.