The Washington Wizards won the 2026 NBA Draft Lottery and were awarded the first overall selection in the upcoming player draft, scheduled for June 23. They will have their choice of the handful of top amateur prospects in the sport, from what is considered a particularly strong class of players. They can also trade away the pick, a maneuver that would presumably return to them either a handful of future draft picks or a proven NBA player, or both. Michael Winger, president of Monumental Basketball, the Ted Leonsis-owned management company that runs the Wizards, reportedly told third-tier hoops scoopster Jake Fischer Sunday night that his front office "will at least consider" trading the pick, as they do not view their lottery windfall as "a savior moment."
The Wizards arrived at this moment by being very bad at basketball. They lost 80 percent of their games this regular season, their third consecutive season with fewer than 20 wins. This one Wizards squad, more or less, is responsible for two of the three seasons in NBA history when a team allowed more than 10,000 total points while scoring fewer than 9,500; per Statmuse, Washington's minus-982 from this regular season is the fourth-worst point-differential in history. The Wizards have not been good—not in any serious way—since 1979, but these recent campaigns have been particularly gruesome, and represent the cynical nadir of a period of total basketball irrelevance.
This season the Wizards had losing streaks of nine, 10, 14, and 16 games, and had winning streaks of two, two, two, and two. From Dec. 26 to Jan. 6 the team unexpectedly won five of seven behind the steady stewardship of veteran guard C.J. McCollum. The next day, on Jan. 7, they traded McCollum and reserve Corey Kispert to the Atlanta Hawks, for Trae Young, whose asset value, distressed by a huge contract, a difficult professional reputation, and a team that plainly did not need him, was at its all-time low. The point was to lose: Following the trade, the Wizards dropped nine in a row. Even that was not enough to push them clear of a large pack of NBA teams that also spent the back half of this season trying to lose. Contorting its roster into hilarious shapes and de-powering itself outrageously, the team finally managed to lose 26 of its final 27 games. Despite all of this, the Wizards finished just two games below the second-worst team in the standings, and just five games worse than the fifth worst.
For their efforts, the Wizards will have a chance to build a roster around someone like A.J. Dybantsa, who I gather is broadly considered the top prospect and the surest thing of the incoming class. The Wizards have not had the top overall pick in the draft since 2010, when they selected Kentucky superstar John Wall. Wall manages to be both proof of the value of a high draft pick and something of a cautionary tale: He played 11 seasons in the NBA, made an All-NBA team and five All-Star teams, won a dunk contest, led the Wizards to four playoff berths and three series wins, and reinvigorated, for a period, the enthusiasm of D.C. hoops fans. Injuries derailed his career, but the Wizards also failed again and again to build a deep contending roster around him. However imperfect Wall may have been as a leading man, it turns out that the franchise's characteristic badness was not something that could be reversed in the acquisition of a single teenager.
It's very funny to me that the NBA has set things up in such a way that a new front office can credibly signal to its fans that it has become serious about getting good not by pointing itself up the standings, but by dive-bombing down them. That's what has happened in Washington, where the team overhauled its front office in 2023 and embarked upon this miserable gutting process. This top pick is the reward. In any case, it could be a while before the tactic is proven successful, or not: Cade Cunningham, star of the East-leading Detroit Pistons, was nabbed with the top pick of the 2021 draft, but the worst years of Detroit's bottoming-out came afterward, when Cunningham suffered through two rounds of coaching turnover and 31 wins across two seasons before the roster finally came together around him. Paolo Banchero was picked first overall by the Orlando Magic after 43 wins in two seasons, and the Magic saw a 12-game improvement in his rookie season, but they appear to have plateaued as an also-ran and just shit-canned their coaching staff. And those are still relative successes. They can't all be Victor Wembanyama or Anthony Edwards. Some of them are Deandre Ayton; some, God help us, are Ben Simmons.
Because it's never a sure thing, and because this draft does not include another Wemby, it can be screwed up. If any franchise is going to screw it up, it's going to be the Washington Wizards. Here is an astounding statistic: Since 1973, when the team moved to Washington from Baltimore, this horrid organization has selected just four total players who have made an All-Star team as representatives of the Wizards/Bullets: Wall, Bradley Beal, Juwan Howard, and Jeff Malone. Assuming they do not trade it away for Zach LaVine and three DeMar DeRozans, this will be the third time since the franchise moved to D.C. that it has used the top overall pick: one time they picked Wall, who was fine; the other time they chose Kwame Brown, who until Anthony Bennett came along was considered the worst draft bust of the 21st century. This is the franchise that spent top-10 picks on Rui Hachimura, Johnny Davis, and Jan Vesely, and all during periods when they were trying very sincerely to be good.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver is embarrassed by tanking, and the NBA's board of governors is expected later this month to approve a proposal to once again rejigger the lottery's odds in order to keep the bottom of the standings decently competitive into the back half of the regular season. They tried this before, flattening the odds among the three worst teams by record, starting in 2019, and in fact Washington on Sunday became the first team since that tweak to finish the regular season with the NBA's worst record and then secure the first pick in the lottery. But if the tweak has worked operationally it has failed strategically: A full third of NBA teams this campaign opted to tank down the stretch, so that the final months of the regular season felt even more perfunctory and fake than usual. Silver's public freakout got owners to take this up as a cause, and as a consequence the Wizards may go down as the last team to bomb their way to the draft's top pick, at least until the next round of lottery reform.
Not everyone is bothered by tanking. I am exhausted by it, both as a topic of conversation and as a sub-theme of each NBA season. I will say this much: The 2025–26 season was the first in at least 30 years where I did not watch one single Washington Wizards game. It wasn't a protest: One of my too many streaming subscriptions had gotten really expensive, and it happened to be the one that I used to watch my home teams. I considered the quality of the team's roster and the likelihood that I would enjoy any of their games, and I decided that I could get my basketball fix from NBA League Pass, and the home team could go screw. It turns out I didn't miss the Wizards at all. A.J. Dybantsa seems cool to me, and I wish him the best, but I do not plan on coming back around for the Wizards, not until they are good. If this makes me a fairweather fan, so be it: The Wizards have been hammering the "rain" button for the better part of a decade, and I am old enough to remember a time when the weather was out of anyone's control. They will not win my loyalty by merely allowing for the possibility of a sunny tomorrow.
