CHICAGO — The Washington Wizards will emerge with a top-five pick. The Brooklyn Nets and the Utah Jazz may each receive a great prize after putting together arguably the least competitive seasons in their histories. The Oklahoma City Thunder could win the whole thing without even trying.
The NBA draft lottery will be held Sunday in Chicago. It could be boring. It may reward tanking. Nobody knows.
The story will be told by four ping-pong balls, plucked out of a hopper in a secure room, with sequestered onlookers from each of the involved teams and a few members of the media looking on. Those balls will create a four-digit combination that will match one previously assigned to the lottery teams, and with that, somebody wins the No. 1 pick in next month’s draft.
“June 23rd, I’ll know where I’m at,” AJ Dybantsa, the BYU star forward who is going pro after leading the nation in scoring in his lone college season, said last month when announcing his decision to make himself available for this year’s draft.
He’ll likely have a pretty good idea Sunday. Dybantsa, Kansas guard Darryn Peterson and Duke big man Cameron Boozer are widely projected to be the first three draft picks — in some order — when the two-day draft starts June 23 at Barclays Center, the home of the Nets.
The Wizards, the Nets and the Indiana Pacers have the best odds of winning the No. 1 pick at 14% each. Those aren’t great odds, of course.
Washington went 3-26 to finish the regular season after the break for the NBA All-Star Game, a stretch that included giving up an 83-point game to Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat. The Wizards cannot finish lower than fifth; in fact, it’s basically a coin flip on whether they will finish exactly fifth or not. Washington has a 52.1% chance of a top-four pick, and a 47.9% shot of being exactly No. 5.
“This was going to be a season of development and opportunity,” Wizards coach Brian Keefe said in his season-ending media availability last month. “And that is something that we really focused on all the way up to Game 82.”
The Wizards expect to be significantly better next season, and a No. 1 pick would only enhance those odds. Washington acquired Anthony Davis and Trae Young in trades during the season, so another year at the very bottom of the NBA would seem unlikely.
The dreaded “T” word (tanking) was uttered with regard to Washington’s approach this season. Same goes for the approaches in Brooklyn and Utah.
The Nets were outscored by 975 points this season (worst in their history) and lost 43 times by double figures. The Jazz were outscored by 858 points this season (worst in their history) and lost 41 times by double figures.
Brooklyn owner Joe Tsai said entering the season that the Nets are rebuilding.
“We hope to get a good pick,” Tsai said at the All-In Summit last fall. “So you can predict what kind of strategy we will use for this season.”
Utah got fined $500,000 during the season for not using its best players in the fourth quarter of games, one of which the Jazz actually won in Miami. Ultimately, Utah finished so poorly that it guaranteed the franchise would keep a top-eight pick in the draft. Had the Jazz won a few more games, that pick could have conveyed to Oklahoma City, the reigning NBA champion that is a win away from a second straight sweep in the first two rounds of this year’s playoffs.
The rest of the odds for the No. 1 pick: 11.5% for the Jazz and the Sacramento Kings, 9.8% for the Atlanta Hawks, 9% for the Memphis Grizzlies, 6.7% for the Dallas Mavericks, 4.5% for the Chicago Bulls, 2% for the Golden State Warriors, 1.5% for the Thunder, 1% for the Heat and 0.5% for the Charlotte Hornets.
Atlanta’s odds are a combination of two potential pathways to the No. 1 pick.
There is seemingly nothing crazier than the possibility of Oklahoma City winding up with the No. 1 pick, but it could happen.
If the spot the Los Angeles Clippers would ordinarily hold wins the lottery, it conveys to the Thunder as part of the trade that also sent 2025 NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to Oklahoma City seven years ago. And the rest of the league would let out a collective groan that will be heard for months to come if that happens.
The Clippers could also get the No. 5 or No. 6 spots if the Pacers “win” either of those slots. If Indiana finishes in the top four, the pick stays with the Pacers. Otherwise, it goes to the Clippers, who have a 48% chance of moving up.
“Call it a coin-flip chance of getting a high, high lottery pick in a loaded draft,” said Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball operations.
Enjoy the chaos while you can. The NBA will almost certainly have a new lottery format in place for next season.
Framework fell into place last month on changes meant to further dissuade tanking, and the NBA Board of Governors is expected to ratify that plan in the next few weeks, with team general managers meeting Tuesday in Chicago to discuss them presumably for one last time.
There was a clear race to the bottom this season with five teams — Washington, Indiana, Utah, Memphis and Brooklyn — all having winning percentages below .180 after the NBA All-Star break. It marked the first time in league history so many teams lost that often after the break.
“The incentives are not necessarily matched here,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in February when discussing the correlation between the teams with the worst records having the best lottery odds. “I think the tradition in sports where the worst-performing team receives the first pick from their partners, when any economist comes and looks at our system, they always point out you have the incentives backwards there. That doesn’t necessarily make sense.”