Even amid the most efficient offensive season in NBA history, there are plenty of have-not teams already looking forward to next year, ready to welcome a draft class that has the makings to be one of the strongest in recent memory. Teams are working on their wish lists at this very moment, imagining the possibility of landing one of the top-tier talents at the top of the board.
Of course, for the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Atlanta Hawks, Christmas came early. The last vestige of the league-shifting Paul George trade back in 2019 could very well net the Thunder a top-four pick in 2026 as a result of the Los Angeles Clippers’ entirely foreseeable implosion. The mind reels thinking about OKC, currently sitting at 24-1 and coming off a title, potentially landing a bigger, faster, stronger version of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in either AJ Dybantsa or Darryn Peterson; a prodigy to build out the team’s Gen Z hive mind in Cameron Boozer; or a galactically explosive young big in Caleb Wilson to add to one of the most imposing defenses in all of professional sports.
The Hawks are similarly fortunate, having the privilege of owning the unprotected 2026 first-round pick of the New Orleans Pelicans, who currently have the worst record in the league. Trae Young’s days were already numbered; his successor could very well come out of this draft class.
Atop the Pelicans’ wish list might well be a time machine—which isn’t at all an indictment of either Jeremiah Fears or Derik Queen, who have had promising starts to their rookie seasons. It’s an indictment of the process. The Pelicans, in the span of eight days this past June, relinquished control of two first-round picks in the 2026 NBA draft, which projects to have multiple franchise-changing talents at the top of the class. For posterity, a quick run-through of what happened:
- On June 17, during the 2025 NBA Finals, the Pacers traded the 23rd pick in the 2025 draft and the rights to Mojave King—the scion of a great basketball lineage in New Zealand’s South Island whose name also sounds like a cannabis dispensary en route to Death Valley—to New Orleans in exchange for Indiana’s own 2026 pick. A curious but innocuous trade at the time. Just five days later, and seven minutes into Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, the value of the pick skyrocketed after Tyrese Haliburton tore his right Achilles tendon.
- Three days after Game 7, on Day 1 of the 2025 draft, the Pelicans packaged that 23rd overall pick with New Orleans’s own unprotected 2026 first to move up 10 spots. Pelicans president Joe Dumars offered the same trade package to just about every team below them in the lottery. Had the Hawks not taken the offer, the Spurs at no. 14 likely would have.
- Again, when given extended minutes, Queen, who was selected with that 13th pick, has looked awesome. That isn’t the issue, though. It’s 2025—under no circumstances is trading away an unprotected first-rounder a good decision! Especially when the team’s ostensible centerpiece is one of the most injury-prone players in the league. Alas, the Pelicans currently sit at 3-21.
For the rest of the league’s dregs, there will similarly be no sudden windfall. They’ll have to fall even deeper down the standings for a percentage chance at a dream. And there’s no guarantee that prayer will ever come true. Over the past 10 seasons, only the Pistons have lost more games than the Wizards. But Washington has yet to be rewarded with the kind of transformative talent that can make sense of its assemblage of raw talent. It was one ping-pong ball away from landing the rights to draft Cooper Flagg this past summer, just like it was one ping-pong ball away from Victor Wembanyama in 2023 … just like it was one ping-pong ball away from Zion Williamson in 2019. But even if the Wizards once again find themselves unlucky in the lottery, this could be one of those proverbial shoot for the stars, land on the moon years.
They won’t be the only ones hoping that the stars align in their favor. Eleven teams currently have a win percentage lower than .400, more a symbolic gesture of need to the basketball gods than a strategy. Tanking isn’t what it used to be. The odds aren’t really in anyone’s favor. Having a bottom-three record in the league still grants only a 14 percent chance at the no. 1 pick, and it very quickly gets worse the further along in the lottery you go. In a lottery system entirely out of the hands of individual franchises, those small differences in odds and percentage points are suddenly worth fighting for. It’s not about control, but it’s all about control.
If nothing else, a commitment to tanking signals a commitment to an unknowable future. If there was ever a time to do it, it was when Victor Wembanyama was entering the league; the next best time is now. There are four massive talents headlining this draft class. What might be the best option for one team might not be the same for another.
Here are some early impressions of the four horsemen of the 2026 class.
Cameron Boozer drives around Michigan State’s Carson Cooper
Cameron Boozer
6-foot-9, 250 pounds, freshman, Duke
Boozer’s leaden movement isn’t built for cinematic TikTok edits, but he has an ironclad profile otherwise. No one in this class can touch Boozer’s body of work. Cam is one of the most accomplished high school basketball players of all time, with a list of accolades on par with the likes of Lew Alcindor and LeBron James. The long-heralded son of Carlos is also on pace to shatter college efficiency metrics. After nine college games, Boozer leads the country in box plus-minus, with a figure that would rate as the highest recorded since the stat was first tracked 15 years ago—higher than even Zion’s during his historic freshman season at Duke in 2018-19.
Much like his father, Boozer is a genius in the post who overwhelms opponents with a youth-defying combination of physicality, tenacity, and next-level attention to detail at just 18 years old. But he might have even bigger selling points in the NBA than his father. Cam’s interior play laid the foundation for his game to expand over the past few years as he grew more comfortable extending his range, pulling up off the dribble, creating shots for himself through off-ball movement, and allowing his basketball instincts to make the game easier for himself and others on both ends of the court. He simply intuits the game in a special way. He already commands constant double-teams and processes them without hesitation: Duke’s game-winning 3 by Isaiah Evans against Florida on Tuesday was the product of Boozer immediately passing out of the blitz on an inverted pick-and-pop. There aren’t many players in the class, regardless of position, who so seamlessly turn snapshot premonitions into actual assists quite like Boozer: His outlet passes already garner Kevin Love comparisons; his touch lobs could become something of a signature.
Taken in the aggregate, he is a player whose statistical dominance and physical limitations can be tough to reconcile. Will his lack of vertical or lateral pop put a cap on his scoring ability? Or is Cam the latest example of functional athleticism (and light-speed processing) being more essential than raw explosiveness? Incredibly tough question to answer! Better, or at least easier, to chase the clear-cut star-wing archetypes whom Boozer shares the spotlight with at the top of the draft. But if you were to press me for a comparison, I’d follow up with some exercises in imagination: What if Hedo Turkoglu bulked up and had the comportment and two-way discipline of Tim Duncan? What if you could isolate the stylistic midpoint between Brook Lopez and Tyrese Haliburton on an Animorphs evolutionary scale? And between his dad’s infamous Bigen fiasco in 2012 and Jaylen Brown’s very recent history of hair dye rubbing off on opponents, what if Cam is the amalgam of every NBA player who has ever blatantly masked his natural hairline? That’s where my mind has gone grasping, at least.
Darryn Peterson during a game against the North Carolina Tar Heels
Darryn Peterson
6-foot-6, 205 pounds, freshman, Kansas
You’ll hear a lot of comparisons for Peterson that can seem overwrought, even forbidden. MJ. Kobe. Penny. His style evokes some of the greatest swingmen in basketball history. Yet, miraculously, it never crosses into the uncanny valley of idol mimicry that has befallen Dylan Raiola with Patrick Mahomes or Tounde Yessoufou with Anthony Edwards early in their respective journeys.
Peterson is a brilliant shotmaker, a dramatically improved on-ball creator, and an unholy terror on defense. It’d be impossible to justify some of the comps he’s getting if he weren’t. But the particular spark in watching Peterson runs deeper than that. His habitus on the court is joltingly familiar, triggering a sort of hardwood Proustian memory. The way Peterson moves, the command he has in getting to his spots, at just 18 years old, is startling. He possesses an economy of motion that players—even the great ones—seldom access in their teenage years, if ever. His dribbles don’t connect through chains; they flow frictionlessly through gradients. He finds uncommon angles of attack because he can manipulate his pace and orientation instantaneously. And those very same tools turn him into a wraith on defense, latching on to the ball handler at the point of attack or emerging out of thin air to wrest the ball away from an unsuspecting driver. He is in control—and that has historically been the missing link for so many players thought to be “next.” Maybe they had the raw athleticism, but they didn’t have the navigation skills for it to matter.
For Jayhawks fans and draftniks alike, hopefully Peterson’s hamstring issues are behind him. After a cruel seven-game absence, he made his much-awaited return to action on Sunday—his first game since November 7—against Mizzou, shaking off the rust to the tune of 17 points in 23 minutes. The burst wasn’t fully on display, but Peterson’s body control and coordination still jumped off the screen as he seamlessly transferred his energy on a drive into a twirling midrange fadeaway. (Yeah, those comps aren’t dying anytime soon.)
There were some concerns during his absence that Peterson might not play another game for the Jayhawks—he’d have been a surefire top-three pick even if he didn’t play another game. Darius Garland was the no. 5 overall pick in 2019 after playing just five games for Vanderbilt, and Peterson is in a completely different universe as a prospect. Luckily, those concerns were unfounded. Peterson’s development arc throughout high school was almost exponential, as he leveled up as a shooter, a defender, and a distributor many times over from start to finish. It would have been nice to see how he’d problem-solve the early-season marquee matchups that Kansas has had over the past month: against Duke, against Tennessee, against UConn. But that’s all in the past; it’s just good to see one of the best guard prospects of the past decade back on the court.
AJ Dybantsa shoots over Dillon Hunter of the Clemson Tigers
AJ Dybantsa
6-foot-9, 210 pounds, freshman, BYU
Dybantsa has every possible physical tool a team could ever want out of a primary wing: height, length, speed, power, fluidity, ground coverage. Despite all that—and notably unlike his contemporary in Peterson—he doesn’t really play like how you might expect. He’s often taken the road less traveled, finding new movement patterns and configurations that express his immense athletic gifts. On the break, most players built like Dybantsa might just make a beeline to the rim at cruise-control speeds. AJ, though, might start skipping, elongating his strides to throw off the backpedaling defender’s sense of rhythm. Dybantsa is constantly adjusting the time signature of his dribbles on the fly. He is intentionally offbeat. Once he has a defender on their heels, that’s when he starts playing the familiar hits.
If that sounds a bit like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, that’s by design—there’s no one Dybantsa has studied more in the past year than SGA. But where Shai developed his style to make up for a lack of size and overt athleticism in his youth, Dybantsa is applying those same tenets from a place of physical surplus. He is already one of the best slashers in college basketball, and the amount of attention he draws with the ball in his hands has allowed him to flash his massive strides as a passer. He’s making the right reads when drawing multiple defenders and has shown off some flair with crosscourt passes that make full use of his height. As he gets more and more comfortable creating for others with a live dribble, we could be looking at a 6-foot-9 primary pick-and-roll initiator down the road. For now, it’s fair to wonder how Dybantsa might adjust to playing a less ball-dominant role at the next level should he find his way onto a team that won’t overburden him to start. The bulk of Dybantsa’s scoring possessions at BYU come off drives to the rim and contested midrange shots—what might he look like in an offense that granted him easier opportunities off the ball?
If there are any real concerns this early on in the season, they’re largely on the defensive side of things, where there are issues with consistency and off-ball attentiveness common among most freshmen, although perhaps they’re less excusable given his tools. Still, his defensive impact is stronger than his paltry steal and block rates suggest, simply by virtue of how much ground he can cover in motion. Effort isn’t the issue as much as internal recognition—the latter can easily develop with time under the right auspices.
Caleb Wilson collects a rebound during a game between the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Radford Highlanders
Caleb Wilson
6-foot-10, 215 pounds, freshman, North Carolina
Wilson is perhaps the biggest eye-of-the-beholder prospect of the lot; his irrepressible physical talent and relentless motor have rocketed him up big boards and crash-landed him into what was supposed to be a big three at the top of the draft. The young Tar Heel is arguably the most explosive lottery talent since the Thompson Twins entered the league in 2023. He’s 6-foot-10, with a massive wingspan and gangly frame, and his dunks (of which there are so, so many) are almost cartoonish in proportion. Art imitates life; Wilson reanimates Space Jam. For the older heads: Think UNLV-era Stacey Augmon, but with the Plastic stretched all the way to its limits (now if only Wilson had the Plastic Man’s layup package). For a long while, the idea of a “run-jump” athlete was more or less the conventional standard of what was perceived as elite athleticism. But it has always implied a level of rigidity. These days, it’s as much about braking and bending. As raw as Wilson may appear to be, he has a refined understanding of how to use his gifts to manipulate defenders. Wilson’s lower-body flexibility allows him to find uncommon driving angles; his long, protracted strides alter his downhill tempo without losing the critical velocity for liftoff. His dunks are astonishing in part because they don’t look violent until he punches the ball through the hoop at his apex.
The passion and GAF he plays with are galvanizing; he whipped the Dean Dome into a frenzy of celebration—his entire body practically vibrating as he let out a primal scream—after a full-court press forced a 10-second violation against Kansas last month. Wilson’s length, lateral agility, and tenacity grant him special powers as a switchable perimeter defender at his size. And his steal and block rates are comparable to Cooper Flagg’s during his freshman season at Duke last year.
Wilson will likely contend with the “Just a Dunker” label that stuck with Blake Griffin for much of his early career, but he’s doing his best to get ahead of that early. The ancillary skills in his game paint an intriguing portrait of potential star outcomes. He has real utility as a grab-and-go player à la Lamar Odom or Jalen Johnson, and he demonstrates excellent vision and touch on high-low passes and hit-aheads in transition, making full use of the weird arm angles that his wingspan allows for. The jury is still out on whether he can extend his shot behind the arc, but he already shows remarkable coordination and balance on Rasheed Wallace–esque baseline fallaways and spinning midrange fadeaways. The final frontier for Wilson might be figuring out how to triangulate his explosiveness, the touch he exhibits on passes, and playing through contact on drives—for as often as he’s dunked in the young college season, he’s missed more than twice the number of layups as he’s made. Wilson isn’t just a dunker, but finishing more cleanly with touch around the rim would go a long way toward proving it.
