NBA Draft Lottery Winners and Losers: Wizards Trade Deadline Gambit Pays Off, Pacers’ Falls Apart

After an ugly tank-filled season (and perhaps the final one), the 2026 NBA draft lottery produced some clear winners and losers.

John Wall, the No. 1 pick in the 2010 NBA draft by the Wizards, represented the franchise as it took home the top pick once again 16 years later. | David Banks-Imagn Images

The Wizards won the 2010 draft lottery, jumping up from the fifth-best odds to land the top pick (10.3%) to land the rights to take Kentucky point guard John Wall, the explosive five-time All-Star who proved to be one of the best players in franchise history.

Clearly, Wall is something of a good luck charm for The District.

Washington’s last win resulted in 2001 top pick Kwame Brown, an infamous draft bust. While Wall didn’t deliver a ton of postseason success to the Wizards, he was a must-watch player in D.C. throughout his career. And on Sunday he represented the team for its first lottery win since his 2010 selection, one that gives Washington its pick of one of the most loaded drafts in recent memory.

Washington is a clear winner from today’s NBA draft lottery. Other teams involved in the 2025–26 tank-a-palooza weren’t as lucky.

Winners of the 2026 NBA draft lottery

Washington Wizards: pick No. 1

The Wizards got a quick five-game preview of Trae Young after trading for the former Hawks star. | Brad Mills-Imagn Images

The Wizards were among the teams attempting to execute a fascinating parallel path to a fast rebuild—fielding a pretty dreadful team on the floor every night while acquiring name-brand stars without letting them impact the lottery odds in any meaningful way.

Washington made a pair of splashes by adding Hawks guard Trae Young and Mavericks forward Anthony Davis, two players with 14 All-Star selections between them. Young played a grand total of 15 games last season, and just five for the Wizards after the deal. Davis did not suit up for Washington, and while he’s stopped well short of asking to be moved again to a contender this offseason, there is plenty of speculation to that end as we near the offseason.

The Wizards will be fascinating next year, especially if Davis is healthy and in the lineup. Alex Sarr, Kyshawn George, Tre Johnson and Bilal Coulibaly are among the intriguing players under 22-year-old already on the roster, and will have a player like AJ Dybantsa joining them next season.

Utah Jazz: pick No. 2

The Jazz jumped up two spots to the second pick, and will have some very strong options available to them, including at least two of the “big three” players projected to be atop the draft: Dybantsa, who played at BYU this season, Darryn Peterson and Cameron Boozer, whose father Carlos was a two-time All-Star for the franchise.

Lauri Markkanen is a former All-Star who is still just 28. Utah made its own aggressive, forward-looking deadline move by adding defensive stopper Jaren Jackson Jr. from the Grizzlies. Young backcourt players Keyonte George, Brice Sensabaugh and last year’s lottery pick Ace Bailey have all flashed potential—and help form the core of a very young team.

Chicago Bulls: pick No. 4

Josh Giddey is expected to remain a centerpiece of the Bulls moving forward. | Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

The Bulls finally picked a lane and it worked out pretty well for them.

After three straight years in the play-in tournament and a decade of mediocrity, Chicago finally opted to tear it down and rebuild, sending out a number of its talented guards as well as franchise cornerstone center Nikola Vučević at the trade deadline. While some of the moves seemed questionable at the time, they did show a team that was done with half-measures.

The Bulls jumped up five spots from their pre-lottery odds placement, finishing with the fourth pick after having just a 20.3% chance of doing so. They will be a popular destination for North Carolina forward Caleb Wilson, who some favor over players like Peterson or Boozer, who are frequently mocked ahead of him. It’s not a bad place to be, and seems like a decent consolation prize after years of dithering when it comes to the future.

Los Angeles Clippers: pick No. 5

The Clippers have plenty of questions to answer about their future, both on- and off-court and notably when it comes to superstar forward Kawhi Leonard, who put in an impressive season but wasn’t enough to bring L.A. to the playoffs. The trade deadline deal of James Harden for Darius Garland seems to have worked out pretty well, with the younger guard playing well after the deal.

Potentially more impactful, especially after the lottery—the trade of Ivica Zubac to the Pacers for their first-round pick, which was protected between picks 1–4 and 10–30 at the time. The result wound up being the best possible for L.A.: the No. 5 pick, especially with the team’s own No. 12 pick heading to the Thunder as part of the Paul George trade. It has to feel good for Steve Ballmer’s front office to claw back some value after how lopsided that deal has wound up being in favor of OKC.

Tanking

It felt like more teams than ever before engaged in the dark art of the tank this season. Eight franchises won fewer than 30 games, not including the 31–51 Bulls, who only began their tank in earnest down the stretch. For the Wizards and the Jazz, a full season of futility worked like a charm. For the Grizzlies and Chicago, whose situations were a bit murkier due to injuries like the one that held Ja Morant to 20 games this season, it helped them leap into the top four, jumping three and five teams with worse records, respectively.

NBA draft lottery losers

Also, tanking

The Nets and Pacers both fell in the NBA draft lottery after their 2025–26 tanking efforts. | Gregory Fisher-Imagn Images

It may have worked for the Wizards and Jazz. It certainly didn’t for the Pacers, Nets and Kings, a couple of whom we’ll get to shortly. Despite some pretty audacious tanking efforts this year, all three franchises were among the five that saw their odds drop in Sunday’s lottery, leaving them with picks outside of the top three.

And if Adam Silver and the NBA have their way, this will be the last time a team can go this far in an attempt to improve its lottery odds, given the commissioner’s promise to curb tanking and the proposal of the 3-2-1 lottery.

Whether or not that totally curbs the practice is up to debate, but the aggressive tanking from a large chunk of the league was enough to get the NBA to take its biggest stand against it yet.

Indiana Pacers: lost No. 5 pick to Clippers

On the other end of that Zubac trade outlined above are the Pacers. The deal was fairly defensible at the time, and Zubac should be an effective runningmate for Tyrese Haliburton, filling the hole left by Myles Turner’s departure for the Bucks last summer. He’s also on a very team-friendly deal for a solid starting center.

And yet, this went about as poorly as it could have for Indiana, to the point that team president Kevin Pritchard apologized to fans after the result.

Brooklyn Nets: pick No. 6

The Nets came up short in their efforts to land a top pick in 2026. | Kevin Sousa-Imagn Images

The Nets made no bones about how they were approaching the 2025–26 season. After taking two big swings at microwaving a championship contender with the ill-fated Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce trade in 2013 and the assemblage of a Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, James Harden superteam in 2021, Brooklyn opted to rebuild the old-fashioned way: by losing a ton of games.

The Nets went 20–62, fielding all manner of sub-NBA-level lineups throughout the year and earned top lottery odds: 14.0%, tied with the Wizards and Pacers. In the end, it only worked for Washington, while Brooklyn will likely have to settle for a player outside the Dybantsa-Peterson-Boozer-Wilson group projected to be atop the draft. That may still prove to be a franchise cornerstone, but once again, the Nets took one on the chin in the lottery.

Conspiracy theorists

The draft lottery always brings its share of conspiracies, dating back to the advent of the lottery in 1985, when the Knicks won the right to draft Patrick Ewing. And conspiracy theorists will find ways to invalidate Sunday’s results, to be sure. The long-suffering Bulls moving up? Memphis landing a top pick after the indignities they suffered at the hands of YouTube golf-mode LeBron James? Sure, you can subscribe to them if you’d like.

The lowly Wizards, so bad and openly tanking that they allowed Bam Adebayo to eclipse his scoring average by about 60 in a game, winning the No. 1 pick doesn’t really lend itself to a conspiracy. Neither does the Jazz jumping to No. 2, or the Bucks, Warriors and Heat sticking in place at Nos. 10, 11 and 13. Even Brooklyn, a big-market club that could desperately use a face of the franchise after seeing Durant, Irving and Harden leave town in short order, would’ve been an easier sell, conspiratorially.

The lottery brought some real chaos this year, but nothing that would seem to implicate the NBA putting its thumb on the scales... or the lottery ball machine.

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