The 2026 NBA draft lottery is on Sunday, and desperation is at an all-time high. It’s a potentially generational draft, with at least three franchise-level guys at the top of it. This season, so many teams blatantly tanked to improve their odds at a good pick that they ushered in full-blown lottery reform, possibly as soon as next season. Which makes this year potentially the last, best chance for the very worst teams to control their own lottery destiny (to an extent). This leads us to a critical question: Who needs a good pick the most? Which of the lottery teams is the most desperate? We ranked all 14 teams with a shot at no. 1.
14. Oklahoma City Thunder (1.5 percent chance at the no. 1 pick, via the Clippers)
The Thunder have gotten the 1-seed out West three years in a row, won the title last season, and are currently up 2-0 over the Lakers in the Western Conference semis. If you are reading a piece about the NBA lottery, I assume you know, too, that they have a trove of draft picks still at their disposal, including this 2026 lottery pick courtesy of the Los Angeles Clippers. The Thunder know how quickly these things can start to go south, and who would say no to more top-end talent, but hard to call any defending champ desperate.
13. Charlotte Hornets (0.5 percent)
A year ago, the Hornets would have been top-three in these rankings, but in 2026 they have something good going. Charlotte just completed one of the more impressive second halves in all of the NBA. The guard rotation of Brandon Miller, Kon Knueppel, LaMelo Ball, and Coby White will be lighting up Charlotte nights for years to come. Moussa Diabate, very nice.
12. Dallas Mavericks (6.7 percent)
They just got a world eater in Cooper Flagg, who beat out Kon for Rookie of the Year and looks every bit like a future superstar. Do they need more talent? Yes, so much. But every team below them would kill to have Flagg on their roster, and the kid’s still only 19.
Here’s the case for Dallas as a sneaky desperate team. Fifteen months after the Luka trade, the franchise is still very much picking up the pieces. Kyrie Irving will turn 35 years old next season, Dereck Lively II has struggled to stay on the court, and the Mavs don't control their own first-round pick again until [eyes bulge] 2031. Until then, this draft is the best chance for new president Masai Ujiri to pair Flagg with another young talent. The stakes are high.
11. Atlanta Hawks (6.8 percent, via the Pelicans)
The Trae Young divorce really couldn’t have worked out better for the Hawks. After trading Young to Washington, Atlanta transformed into one of the better teams in the East, climbing all the way to sixth by the end of the season. Jalen Johnson can give it to you any way you want it. Nickeil Alexander-Walker has transformed himself into an every night problem. CJ McCollum remains capable of showing up in the opposing defense’s nightmares. Atlanta still needs to find its lion, but there are interesting pieces in place. Had the Hawks not gotten walked over by the Knicks in the first round, they might have been more like 12th or 13th here.
10. Indiana Pacers (14.0 percent)
Regardless of where their draft pick falls, next year’s Pacers should look a lot more like the buzz saw that made the 2025 Finals than the toilet outfit that finished with the second-worst record in the NBA this season. They’ll get Tyrese Haliburton back, and they’ll get a full season of Ivica Zubac teaming up with Aaron Nesmith, Andrew Nembhard, and Pascal Siakam to terrorize opposing offenses. The ceiling for this team is high. The desperation level, probably not.
A fly hovers above the ointment, though. Because of the Zubac trade, if their pick falls between 5 and 9, the fly cannonballs into the ointment and the pick goes to the Clippers. If it falls 1 through 4 or 10th or later, they’ll keep it and owe a 2031 first to the Clippers. Hard to figure if this makes them more or less desperate, so we’ll have them here at 10.
9. Utah Jazz (11.5 percent)
On the one hand, Utah has blatantly tanked each of the past three seasons and hasn’t had a top-four pick to show for it. On the other hand, the Jazz saw enough from Lauri Markkanen, Keyonte George, Ace Bailey, Walker Kessler, and the rest of the supporting cast to go out and trade for Jaren Jackson Jr. at the deadline. There’s now a vision in place for this team. They may not be championship contenders, but they’re hardly desperate.
8. Memphis Grizzlies (9.0 percent)
It’s May 2023. You are a Grizzlies fan. Your team just finished a second season in a row with 50-plus wins and earned the 2-seed out West. You have one of the best young guards in the game, and talented grinders all around him. Your second and third options are also babies. One’s a knockdown shooter, the other is a rangy big that can catch lobs, protect the rim, slide with guards on the perimeter, shoot the 3, and even handle the ball a little bit. The future is blinding.
But the basketball gods, righteous and gorgeous and worthy of praise, can, at times, be sadists. Injury woes grabbed hold, chemistry began to splinter, Ja got off track. And the seasons felt long. Now the Grizzlies are coming off one of the most depressing seasons in franchise history. Morant has been hurt and at odds with his teammates and his coaches and it seems all but certain that his time in Memphis has run its course. The Grizzlies organization and their fans are also about a week removed from having to see Morant and JJJ watch Desmond Bane in a playoff game, and a couple of months removed from LeBron (stupidly) arguing the team should be relocated. The fan base needs a win. Still, there’s a good amount of talent on the roster. Cedric Coward, Zach Edey, Ty Jerome, and a promising core of young role players including Cam Spencer, the best player in the league. Sure, they’re pretty desperate, but not top-three-or-bust desperate when some of their lottery competition has been living this cellar life for years.
7. Miami Heat (1.0 percent)
Pat Riley. The man is getting up there, and flopping his rings on the table hasn’t been working the way it used to. I’m sure Gucci’s still returning his calls, but his is a team that is stuck in the middle and needs help. They cannot always wait for a disgruntled star to decide he wants to live in South Beach. This is not a knock on Riles. He’s a legend, has given much to the game, but this team is spinning its wheels in the middle. The Heat don’t currently employ someone who could be the best player on a title team. If they want something sustainable, this team needs lottery luck in a bad way.
6. Washington Wizards (14.0 percent)
The Washington Wizards are not without talent. Their past few drafts have yielded an extremely young, moderately interesting young corps, and their trade deadline activity brought in Trae Young and Anthony Davis. Young played five games for Washington, Davis played none.
On the last day of the 2024-25 season, the Wizards played to win. Bub Carrington hit a buzzer-beater to beat the Heat 119-118. The basketball gods did not reward them with a top-five pick. This year, they went the other way and became one of our most blatant tankers, including allowing 83 points to Bam Adebayo. Maybe they’ll get a better pick this time around and finally make desperation a stranger.
5. Chicago Bulls (4.5 percent)
You have to feel for the people of Chicago. The fan base has had to watch as Ayo Dosunmu and Coby White (not to mention Alex Caruso) have had incredible postseason moments for other teams. Meanwhile, they are building around Josh Giddey and the contract of Patrick Williams.
But the Bulls have a new GM now. They’ll have a new coach too, at some point, with Billy Donovan and the club recently parting ways. It’s a new era in Chicago. A wiping of the slate. A reason to believe dawn will come brighter. What’s that? Jerry Reinsdorf’s still there? Well, shit, that sucks.
4. Brooklyn Nets (14.0 percent)
The Nets may be more starving for talent than anyone in the league. The roster is currently yeeeeeeeesh. They don’t have The Guy yet. They don’t have The Other Guy either. The Nets aren’t even a lounge act right now. They open for the opener. They are the artists listed in the bottom row of the music festival poster, the ones in size-seven font, and that’s only if they know someone at the festival.
3. Golden State Warriors (2.0 percent)
Steph Curry is still capable of extreme fireworks, and so long as he remains under the Warriors’ employ, the team will be wildly desperate for any kind of top-end talent to either put next to him or use to go get someone else. The Great Warriors Experiment is teetering on the edge of extinction. Steve Kerr might not be the coach next year. Draymond Green might be gone. He’s on Inside the NBA saying, “We had that hug for a reason” and trying to make fun of Charles Barkley. Golden State badly needs a new guy to get excited about, someone who can lead the Warriors into a post-Steph world, someone that could make this whole thing feel, I don’t know, less depressing?
2. Milwaukee Bucks (3.0 percent)
What is waiving and stretching Damian Lillard to make room for Myles Turner if not desperation? What is employing two of Giannis’s brothers, getting into public spats with him over his playing status, and hiring a new coach with Giannis’s future in question, if not desperation?
Milwaukee has been backing itself into a corner for years, and the 2026 lottery really might be (God willing) the final ray of hope for the Giannis era. The draft coffers are bare. The in-house talent is nonexistent. Turner was a nonfactor last season, and the Bucks missed the playoffs for the first time since 2016. A top pick would provide either a road map for the post-Giannis Bucks or turn into one more desperate attempt to convince him to stay.
One problem: The Bucks will end up with the worse pick of New Orleans’s, which goes to the Hawks, and their own. So basically, for them to have a shot at a high pick, they need both those picks to jump together in concert.
1. Sacramento Kings (11.5 percent)
We extend our arms. We extend our arms and embrace Kings fans around the world, a fine people who deserve far more than the drivel that Sacramento has been putting on the court. That magical beam season in 2022 turned out to be nothing but an oasis in the basketball desert they had been stumbling through for so long. Somehow, they’re now as deep in the wilderness as they’ve ever been. The forest is so thick and untouched it takes five hours to move half a mile. The Kings are old and expensive. They had the fifth-highest payroll in the NBA and finished tied for the fourth-worst record. They need somebody who can come in and make things easier on everyone, someone who can come in and clear a path in the right direction, make things fun, inject some life into the organization. They also need the kind of superstar who would demand the team make retro Rochester Seagrams jerseys. The league’s a better place when Sacramento is good. That fan base is incredible, one of the league’s very best. That beam is magnificent, the league’s very best. Ain’t nobody else working with a beam like that. Many wish they had beams like that. They’re jealous of The Beam. They’re desperate for an idea that revelatory. Sacramento needs a player with that kind of wattage.
