A grand finale in the lottery for the tankers.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
By JOHN HOLLINGER / THE ATHLETIC
Where are the angry basketball gods when you need them?
The Washington Wizards, Utah Jazz and Memphis Grizzlies — the NBA’s three most egregious tankers this season — were nonetheless rewarded in Sunday’s draft lottery with the top three picks.
For the last time, hopefully, tanking paid off. Can you imagine the outrage if the NBA was not planning to reform tanking after this season? All three teams were guilty of shutting down good players and then leaning on substitutes and G League players.
I have been in their shoes. When I was vice president for basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, I would have done the same thing. But this underscored 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. And Utah went 6-24, but don’t let that “good” record fool you; two of the wins were against Memphis and Washington.
The Jazz and the 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. Let’s walk through the other winners and losers.
Loser: Unintended consequences
League executives are wondering how these two proposed lottery reforms will work: not allowing teams to win the lottery in consecutive years and not allowing teams to pick in the Top 5 in three consecutive years.
Because picks are tradable and teams can have more than one in a single draft, you start getting into complications quickly. Are we saying a team can’t land at No. 1 in two consecutive years, or their pick can’t land at No. 1? Same for the Top 5 rule, and add in this one: What if some general manager accumulates four picks in the same lottery but has picked in the Top 5 in the two previous drafts? Can none of them land in the Top 5?
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 coming “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 5. 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 probably 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 5–pick rule is Utah, which is also trying to win next season.
That should buy the league another year to figure out what it really wants to happen with the No. 1 and Top 5 restrictions, and perhaps to add some guardrails to deal with outlier cases.
Winner: Every other contender
The disaster scenario of the Oklahoma City Thunder landing in the Top 4 has been averted; the Thunder had a 7% chance of moving up via an unprotected pick from the Los Angeles 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 the 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 4. Even the 46-win Atlanta Hawks were shut out, despite the sixth-best odds of winning and a 40% chance of a Top 4 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 though Utah in particular will be waking up from its half-decade slumber, it is by no means an instant contender. It would be a big surprise if any of the Top 4 teams (Washington, Utah, Memphis and Chicago) were still playing after May 1 next year, and the fifth pick is not enough to make the Clippers dangerous.
As a result, all of 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 4 and the New Orleans Pelicans’ own pick finishing eighth, we have a final tally on the two trades from last June in which New Orleans ended up with the 13th pick in the 2025 draft and selected 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 the Pacers made a fascinating deal in the Ivica Zubac swap at the trade deadline, a calculated risk by both teams 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% chance of picking fifth or sixth.)
Well, the Clippers probably got the better end of that lottery spin, getting the pick five years earlier and probably 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 inquiry 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 Clippers 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. But 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 5 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 other team, 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 by the New York Knicks on the court on Sunday but also took an L off it. The Sixers own the Clippers’ unprotected 2028 pick and a Top 3 protected swap in 2029; both of those looked more valuable before the Clippers landed the fifth pick.
Losers: Nets and Kings
File this one under “bad beats for bad teams.” The Brooklyn Nets and the Sacramento Kings combined to go 42-122 this season and, as their reward, will pick sixth and seventh.
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 and 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 before a 2027 season in which 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.
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