Where are the angry basketball gods when you need them?
The Washington Wizards, Utah Jazz and Memphis Grizzlies — the league’s three most egregious, embarrassing, shameful tankers in the tankfest that was the 2025-26 season — were nonetheless rewarded with the top-three picks in a loaded 2026 draft in Sunday’s lottery.
For the last time, hopefully, tanking paid off. Can you imagine the outrage if the league wasn’t planning to reform tanking after this season? All three teams were guilty of shutting down good players who were basically healthy, leaning on tanktacular substitutes in their places and signing randos out of the G League to play 40 minutes on short notice.
I’ve been in their shoes as vice president of basketball operations for the Grizzlies, and I would have done the same thing, because those are the current incentives in the system. It paid off! But this underscores the obvious need for change.
On the day of the trade deadline, Memphis was 20-29, just two games out of the Play-In Tournament. Had the Grizzlies gone 17-16 from there, they would have passed the Golden State Warriors for the last Play-In spot. Instead, they went 5-28.
Hold my beer, said Washington: The Wizards shut down Trae Young and Anthony Davis with nebulous injuries and went 3-29. Utah, meanwhile, went 6-24, but don’t let that “good” record fool you; two of the wins were against Memphis and Washington.
The Jazz and Grizzlies were also responsible for perhaps the single most embarrassing game in the last decade, a 147-101 Jazz win in which only three of the players used by either side are likely to be on an NBA roster next season. Utah started Oscar Tshiebwe, Kennedy Chandler and Blake Hinson and won by 46, so you can imagine what Memphis’ lineup looked like.
Unfortunately, the shameless tankers were our biggest winners from the lottery. But a lot of other things happened on Sunday, and some of them were genuinely good. Let’s walk through the other winners and losers:
Loser: Unintended consequences
One of the big questions I heard from league executives after writing about the league’s lottery reform is how the nitty-gritty works with two specific proposed rules: not allowing teams to win the lottery in consecutive years, and not allowing teams to pick in the top five in three straight years.
Because picks are tradeable, and teams can have more than one in a single draft, you start getting into complications pretty quickly. Are we saying a team can’t land at No. 1 in two straight years, or their pick can’t land at No. 1? Ditto for the top-five rule, and add in this one: What if some future Sam Presti out there accumulates four picks in the same lottery but has picked in the top five in the two previous drafts? Can none of them land in the top five?
The upshot, in either case, is an arbitrage opportunity where teams might swap picks because theirs is more valuable in another team’s hands than in their own, possibly even with picks in the same lottery. (That’s more likely in the upcoming “3-2-1” proposed system, where several teams will have identical odds.)
Alas, the chance for MAXIMUM CHAOS in 2027 mostly went out the window by virtue of the teams that landed in the top five. Washington can’t win the top pick again next year, but the Wizards’ only first-round pick next year is their own, and Washington is likely gunning for a playoff spot while pursuing win-now strategies such as “let Young and Davis actually play.”
Additionally, the only team affected by the top-five-pick rule is Utah. Similar to the Wizards above, Utah is trying to win next year. But even if the Jazz ended up lucking into a top-five slot, Utah doesn’t control its 2027 pick as a result of the Jaren Jackson Jr. trade with Memphis; that pick likely goes to the Grizzlies now, as Memphis receives the best of Utah’s, Minnesota’s and Cleveland’s pick.
The Jazz would only be impacted if at least two of Utah, Cleveland and Minnesota end up in the top five after the lottery drawing, because Utah’s pick is the second-best of the three.
That should buy the league another year to figure out what it really wants to happen with the top-one and top-five restrictions, and perhaps to put some added guardrails to deal with outlier cases.
Winner: Every other contender
The disaster scenario of the Oklahoma City Thunder landing in the top four has been averted; the Thunder had a 7 percent chance of moving up via an unprotected pick from the Clippers from the Paul George trade but ended up 12th. You can exhale, at least for a bit: The Thunder still have an unprotected swap from the Clippers in 2027 before that heist completes.
The secondary worst-case scenario for Eastern Conference contenders was 2025 finalist Indiana getting the top pick, but that one also failed to emerge; the pick went to the Clippers when it landed outside the top four. Even the 46-win Atlanta Hawks were shut out, despite the sixth-best odds of winning and a 40 percent chance of a top-four slot with the better of New Orleans’ or Milwaukee’s pick; Atlanta ended up eighth.
Bigger picture, the four teams at the top of the draft are all in rebuild situations, and while Utah in particular will be waking up from its half-decade slumber, it is by no means an insta-contender. It would be a big surprise if any of the top four teams (Washington, Utah, Memphis and Chicago) were still playing after May 1 next year, and the fifth pick isn’t enough to make the Clippers dangerous.
As a result, all the teams playing in May right now, or hoping to, can pretty much carry on with their business. Nothing happened on lottery day to overturn their plans.
Loser: Pelicans, of course
With Indiana’s pick landing outside the top four and the New Orleans Pelicans’ own pick finishing eighth, we have a final tally on the two trades from last June that saw New Orleans end up with the 13th pick in the 2025 draft and select Derik Queen. The two picks the Pelicans forewent are the fifth (from Indiana, returned to the Pacers and since dealt to the Clippers) and eighth (their own, sent to Atlanta) selections in a loaded 2026 draft.
Queen had a decent enough rookie season, but at a price of two high lottery picks, what seemed even at the time as a generous overpay has been confirmed as such. The Pelicans, who went 26-56, have no first-round pick this year. That changes in 2027, at least, as they are the ones who have the better of the Bucks’ pick or their own, and Milwaukee’s pick could prove quite valuable.
Winner: Clippers, mostly
The Clippers and Pacers made a fascinating deal in the Ivica Zubac swap at the trade deadline, a calculated risk by both sides that gave the Clippers roughly 50-50 odds of picking fifth through ninth and, if not, sent them an unprotected 2031 first-rounder instead. (By lottery day, this had been reduced to a 47.9 percent chance of picking either fifth or sixth.)
Well, the Clippers likely got the better end of that lottery spin, getting the pick five years earlier and likely in a better position than it would have landed in 2031.
It also comes with one added benefit, given how the league’s Aspiration investigation seems to be dragging on: It allows the Clippers to possibly use the pick before the league could take it from them. If the saga has no resolution in the next six weeks, the Clippers can use the pick, which is far and away the most valuable asset they have that the league could force them to surrender. (The Clips still do have a 2029 unprotected Pacers first.)
However, some possible headaches come along with this reward. For starters, the fifth spot in the draft is the one where it seems almost certain that a point guard is the next man up on the board. However, the Clippers just traded for 26-year-old Darius Garland and seemingly want to give him the keys to the offense; that could get … interesting. Might Garland be a low-key trade candidate now? If not immediately, then certainly in-season?
Secondarily, a top-five pick also comes with an $11 million cap hit. That complicates some scenarios where the Clippers become a cap-room team this summer, especially if they look to move Kawhi Leonard and take back less salary. On the other hand, that’s less of an issue a year from now, when the Clippers will have as much 2027 cap space as any team in the league, and the only two players under contract for more than eight figures, awkwardly, are Garland and the draft pick.
Finally, let us take a minute to mourn the Philadelphia 76ers, who not only were destroyed on the court on Sunday but also took an L off it. The Sixers own the Clippers’ unprotected 2028 pick and a top-three protected swap in 2029; both of those looked more valuable before the Clippers landed the fifth pick.
Losers: Nets, Kings
File this one under “bad beats for bad teams.” The Brooklyn Nets and Sacramento Kings combined to go 42-122 this season and, as their reward, will pick sixth and seventh, respectively.
Sacramento made up 5 1/2 games on Utah in the last five weeks of the season to end up tied with the Jazz; Utah ended up with the fifth-place ping-pong balls. Basically, that late rally resulted in the Kings picking seventh instead of second. (Shoutout to Devin Carter, Daeqwon Plowden, Nique Clifford and Maxime Raynaud for leading a riveting, unlikely comeback against Golden State the final week of the season.)
Picking seventh should at least allow the Kings to solve a glaring need at point guard, with one of the three gems in this draft (Keaton Wagler, Kingston Flemings or Darius Acuff Jr.) all but certain to be available.
As for Brooklyn … yikes. In the wake of what looks like a fairly disastrous 2025 draft (the Nets used five first-round picks, but only two look anything like a rotation player so far), they needed help from the lottery gods ahead of a 2027 season where they owe an unprotected first-round pick swap to a likely playoff team in Houston.
The Nets’ current roster is one of the league’s least talented, and picking sixth is unlikely to deliver a savior, even in a draft this strong. The Nets also have max cap room but enter a market where finding somebody worth spending it on may prove challenging. Their post-James Harden team-building challenge remains daunting.
Winner: Memphis’ post-Ja Morant pivot
If the Grizzlies were 99 percent certain to trade Ja Morant before the lottery hit, well, now they’re 99.1 percent likely.
Moving into the third slot pushed them out of the range where the Flemings-Acuff-Wagler point guard trio is the likely pick but also allows them to grab one of the four players in this draft seen as having true star equity (AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, Cameron Boozer and Caleb Wilson).
In other words: Now Memphis has a centerpiece. The Grizzlies can market the team around this guy and build their future roster around his skill set rather than Morant’s. Memphis can afford to be patient, with at least one building block guaranteed via this pick and three first-round picks in 2027. If they can find a taker for Morant without taking back a gross salary, the Grizzlies will have a gazillion dollars of cap space in the summer of 2027.
Winner: Toni Kukoč
By far the swaggiest of the lottery podium participants, Kukoč looked like he just rolled in from a Croatian beach cabana, climbed out of a convertible and threw on a blazer over his T-shirt at the last minute. He was chilling in his tinted glasses and then beaming as the Bulls moved up to the fourth position from ninth (where they will presumably draft somebody better than Patrick Williams this time).
While the Bulls have a long rebuilding road ahead, this was at least something of a jolt in the arm for a team that waited too long to tank, didn’t get much in the way of assets for its players and will be bad just as lottery reform hits the worst teams. Fourth in a draft thought to have four star-caliber talents is a pretty nice bit of fortune to kick off a new era under recently hired GM Bryson Graham.