Ranking 2026 NBA Draft Lottery Teams Most Desperate for No. 1 Pick
The 2026 NBA lottery is teeming with higher-than-usual stakes.
Every squad with ping pong balls always hopes to win the No. 1 pick. Some are invariably more desperate than the others. They might not have a primary cornerstone in place or a player to whom they can point as a potential one. They also might not have control over future picks, making the most immediate selection that much more important.
Those are the usual stakes. This year, though, teams head to Chicago for Sunday's festivities knowing reform is on the horizon.
A proposal that heavily flattens odds and expands the lottery is gaining momentum, according to ESPN's Shams Charania.
Under the new rules, teams that do not qualify for the playoffs or play-in tournament and finish with lottery spots four through 10 would receive three "lottery balls" apiece. Squads with bottom-three records, meanwhile, would get just two lottery balls—the same number given to the No. 9 and 10 seeds in the play-in tournament.
Basically, if you are a bottom-of-the-standings member right now, this may be your last chance to capitalize on odds that skew heavily in your favor.
Thrown atop everything else, including the high regard for this year's top‑four prospects, the value of luck has arguably never mattered more.
5. Washington Wizards
1 of 5
After drafting inside the top 10 for the past four years and swinging a pair of fairly shocking trades this past season, the Washington Wizards are chock full of guys. They just don't have The Guy.
Anthony Davis and Trae Young are additives to a win-now operation, but neither is playing within their best-player-on-a-contender window anymore. Just ask Anthony Davis himself. Alex Sarr is the most viable answer and has made strides at both ends over the past two years, but he hasn't delivered enough standout self-creation or anchor-of-a-great-defense stretches to end Washington's face-of-the-next-era debate.
Beyond Sarr, Davis and Young, the Wizards have Kyshawn George, Tre Johnson and Bilal Coulibaly as prospective candidates. George looms as the clubhouse leader among the three. Again, though, nobody is in beyond-reproach territory.
Washington's sheer breadth of might-bes prevents it from landing any higher on the desperation scale. It wouldn't be in the top five if the New Orleans Pelicans control the rights to their own pick. The Wizards' acquisitions of AD and Trae also suggests they're not married to nabbing their primary cornerstone through the draft.
That could be a good thing. It's also an aggressive, open‑ended approach that exposes them to self-sabotage if they give up too much for the wrong player.
Regardless, while the Wizards aren't quite barren of potential best-player-of-the-future options, the absence of an undeniable answer is nothing if not unsettling given how long they've been trying to find one.
4. Memphis Grizzlies
2 of 5
With Desmond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. already gone, it's only a matter of time before the Memphis Grizzlies send Ja Morant packing as well. Even if they don't, he has done little over the past three seasons to suggest he can be the tip of the spear for a championship contender.
Possible alternatives are no longer on the docket, either. You had to stretch the boundaries of imagination to justify Bane or Jackson at That Dude. More pretzel-twisting is required to do the same for Cedric Coward or Zach Edey.
Memphis controls all of its future first-round picks and has four additional ones coming its way. For a franchise that has mined value well outside premier lottery positions, bites at the draft apple are worth more to it than many others—particularly in the soon-to-be flattened-odds era.
At the same time, the Grizzlies' search for a cornerstone is almost entirely hitched to a singular wagon. They would not be a hot destination even if free agency weren't dead. More critically, they were reluctant to swing blockbuster trades when the Morant-Jackson-Bane trio was at its perceived peak. The notion of them going after a No. 1-type name before already having an established option in place is beyond farfetched.
3. Chicago Bulls
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A new era is officially beginning for the Chicago Bulls! They have tapped Bryson Graham, most recently of the Atlanta Hawks, as their next executive vice president of basketball operations. He will oversee a front office previously led by Arturas Karnišovas, who chaperoned Chi-Town through one of the most sub-mediocre eras of basketball ever.
Graham is inheriting a fairly complicated slate. The Bulls can dredge up a league-best nearly $60 million in cap space this summer and have all their own first-rounders moving forward. But the roster is barren of anyone who can headline a contender.
Though perception of Josh Giddey varies, his defensive issues coupled with up-and-down scoring aggression and efficiency inside the arc are limitations that render him a universal non-answer. Matas Buzelis is as close as Chicago comes to a tent pole for the future. And while he's more fit to carry that expectation than youngsters like Egor Dёmin, Cedric Coward or Bilal Coulibaly, that is ultimately damning with faint praise.
Urgency to clean house at the lottery in The Windy City gets cranked up to 11 if you believe C-Suite history is about to repeat itself. The front office may be getting a makeover, but the Reinsdorfs remain in charge.
If Graham accepted his new post under the mandate that the Bulls expedite their climb up from the bottom of the middle, that doesn't give much time to lean into a developmental-talent accumulation.
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2. Brooklyn Nets
4 of 5
No other team is further away from having a superstar bedrock than the Brooklyn Nets.
Other squads at least employ fringe All-NBA possibilities. Michael Porter Jr. and Egor Dёmin are Brooklyn's best options in this department. Neither is good enough.
MPJ is coming off a career year that wasn't enough to bag him an All-Star selection. Going on 28 and entering the final season of his contract, he's also more of a placeholder.
Dёmin's shooting is better than expected, and he has tantalizing vision, including when on the move. But you have to squint ridiculously hard to envision him becoming more than a second or third banana.
Complicated still, Brooklyn doesn't control its own 2027 first-rounder. The Houston Rockets have swap rights on it. The Nets can't count on some flattened-odds luck yielding a No. 1 selection before 2028.
This is all grounds enough to put Brooklyn in the top spot, but its desperation level is a touch lower than the sad-sorry franchise to come.
The Nets can drum up more than $30 million in cap space this summer, have a bunch of extra draft goodies they can use to go big-name hunting and reside in a desirable market should free agency ever become cool again. So while their cornerstone situation is dire, it's not hopeless.
1. Sacramento Kings
5 of 5
The Sacramento Kings need a face-of-the-franchise prospect more than anyone else, and it's not all that debatable.
The Nets not having control over their 2027 first-rounder gives them a peripheral case, but playing in Brooklyn, they can hold out hope for free-agent victories unavailable to other squads. That includes the Kings.
Domantas Sabonis is the closest this roster gets to a top-15 guy, and he's more of an any-given-season All-NBA candidate rather than a perennial staple. His limitations on defense and even, to a lesser extent, on offense also require you to flesh out the rest of the core in ultra-specific ways.
Crossing your fingers for Keegan Murray to become pillar material is a fool's errand. The odds of him reaching his peak have diminished over the past couple of seasons, and even if he hits it, his pinnacle looks something like a complementary offensive player who can play lockdown defense.
All the cap space in the world wouldn't change anything for the Kings. Not that it matters. They don't have any. They need to cut costs just to avoid the luxury tax.
Sacramento isn't winning any trade wars, either. It has control over all of its own first-rounders with the exception of 2031 (swap) but is too far from contention to transact its way to the mountaintop. You could add Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama or Nikola Jokić to the meat and potatoes of this core, and it still wouldn't sniff the inner circle of title hopefuls.
Dan Favale is a National NBA Writer for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky (@danfavale), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, co-hosted by Bleacher Report's Grant Hughes.
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