The Washington Wizards won the 2026 NBA Draft Lottery on Sunday, becoming the first team to hold the league's worst record and land the No. 1 pick since the NBA flattened the odds in 2019. They are expected to take BYU forward AJ Dybantsa. The Indiana Pacers, meanwhile, watched their 2026 first-rounder fall to No. 5 and convey to the Los Angeles Clippers as part of the Ivica Zubac trade. The rest of the lottery shook out as one of the cleanest splits between strategic winners and strategic losers in a decade.
Final top 14
- Washington Wizards
- Utah Jazz
- Memphis Grizzlies
- Chicago Bulls
- Los Angeles Clippers (from Indiana)
- Brooklyn Nets
- Sacramento Kings
- Atlanta Hawks (from New Orleans)
- Dallas Mavericks
- Milwaukee Bucks
- Golden State Warriors
- Oklahoma City Thunder (from LA Clippers)
- Miami Heat
- Charlotte Hornets
Winners
Washington Wizards. The Wizards' arc this season was the single most coherent tank in the league. They acquired Trae Young from Atlanta in January and Anthony Davis from Dallas in February, then proceeded to bench-or-shut-down both for the back half of the season. The roster on paper looked like a play-in team. The roster on the floor looked like a G-League invitational. They finished with the worst record in the NBA, kept their own first, and now hold the rights to the consensus top prospect in the class. AJ Dybantsa pairs with Bub Carrington and Alex Sarr to give Washington its first real young core since the John Wall draft in 2010. The veterans were never the plan. They were a tax-management device until the lottery. Mission complete.
Utah Jazz. No. 2 lands them Kansas guard Darryn Peterson, the consensus second-best player in the class. Utah already has Jaren Jackson Jr., Lauri Markkanen, and Walker Kessler. What the roster lacks is a top-shelf shot creator, and Peterson is the closest thing this draft offers. The franchise's tanking discipline this season — quietly resting veterans, leaning on rookies — produced a top-two outcome on the first try. Danny Ainge's preferred kind of result.
Memphis Grizzlies. The Grizzlies got No. 3 in the year they needed it most. Memphis traded Desmond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. is up next as the obvious rebuild-decision lever. With lottery reform on the way, this was effectively Memphis's last clean shot at a top pick before the floor of tanking value gets raised. Cameron Boozer at No. 3 is a real-and-immediate plug for a young roster.
Los Angeles Clippers. Maybe the day's most underrated outcome. The Clippers acquired Indiana's protected first in the Zubac trade — protection was 1-4 and 10-30, meaning the pick only conveys if it lands at 5-9. Conveyance probability: 47.9 percent. It hit at exactly No. 5. The Clippers, who otherwise had no first-round pick, walked away with a top-five selection in one of the best drafts of the past decade. They keep Kawhi and James Harden's window open with a 19-year-old wing on a rookie deal.
Chicago Bulls. New head of basketball operations Bryson Graham gets a top-four pick before he's had to make a single hard decision about the existing roster. Caleb Wilson or Cameron Boozer is a defensible cornerstone in either direction. The Bulls have been a perpetual middle-out team for three years. The fastest way out is here.
Losers
Indiana Pacers. The Zubac trade gave Indiana exactly what they wanted at the time — depth in the frontcourt for a deep playoff run — and is now the most expensive deadline move of the cycle. President Kevin Pritchard owned it on social media: "I own taking this risk. Surprised it came up 5th." That is the closest thing to a public mea culpa an NBA front office produces. Indiana has missed the playoffs ten times since 1990. A top-five pick in a class headlined by Dybantsa, Peterson, and Boozer was the kind of asset rebuilding mid-market teams cannot manufacture. They traded it away nine months ago. The Clippers thank them.
Brooklyn Nets. Brooklyn entered with five first-round picks and a pretty believable argument that they could re-engineer the franchise in a single draft. They came out at No. 6 with their own pick and a tied-for-largest fall in the lottery. The Nets needed top-four. They got middle of the lottery. The five-pick draft package is still real, but the marquee story they were selling — top-of-the-draft talent plus depth — collapses to depth alone.
Sacramento Kings. No. 7. The franchise's 20-year drought of lottery good fortune continues. With reform flattening odds further next year and the Kings' roster too good to drop into the deep tank, this was the lottery they had to hit. They did not. The team is now stuck between a rebuild they cannot commit to and a contention window they have not earned.
Milwaukee Bucks. No. 10 with the Bucks' own pick, no top-four jump, no leverage. Anyone trying to read Giannis trade markets gets a clean answer: Milwaukee did not buy itself a coffee-table draft pick to dangle. The pivot, if there is one, will be done with the existing assets, not a sweetener fresh from the lottery wall.
The reform deadline
The 2026 lottery is the last under the current weighted system. The proposed reform — flattening the odds further and explicitly penalizing the three worst regular-season teams — fundamentally rewrites the rebuild playbook. Under the new rules, what the Wizards did this year (trade for veterans, sit them, finish 28th, win the top pick) becomes statistically much less rewarding. The worst team's odds at No. 1 are expected to drop from the current weighted top tier into single digits.
That makes the Wizards' outcome historically anomalous on both ends. They executed the cleanest tank of the year, and they did it the same year the tank is about to stop paying. Memphis, Sacramento, and any other franchise that thought they had a few more lottery cycles to engineer a rebuild are now staring at a draft system that values them less than the standings would suggest. The smart front offices spent this week not just reacting to the lottery, but to the fact that the lottery itself is becoming a worse engine for franchise repair.
The June draft will produce the first generational class to hit the NBA under the old rules. The next time the league reshuffles bottom teams, the cost of being bad will be much higher, and the reward will be much smaller. The Wizards, with Dybantsa and Trae and AD, just bought themselves the last lottery ticket of its kind.
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