The NBA lottery gods repaid what was becoming a major debt to the Washington Wizards by awarding them with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 draft. This is a team that was one ping-pong ball away from the No. 1 pick in the Zion Williamson (2019), Victor Wembanyama (2023) and Cooper Flagg (2025) drafts.
The 2025 fall was the one that statistically hurt the most. They had the second-worst record in the league that season (they’re actually the first team in history to lose at least 64 games three consecutive years) and thus a max 14.5% chance at Flagg. Instead, they got Tre Johnson at No. 6.
The two highest picks the Wizards have had since they took John Wall at No. 1 in 2010 came in 2013 (when they got Otto Porter Jr. at No. 3 in what has proven to be an incredibly weak lottery class) and 2024 (when they selected Alex Sarr at No. 2 in another painfully weak class).
Unless every scout and draft analyst in the world is wrong, 2026 is the very opposite of a weak class. To get this particular No. 1 pick appears to be a serious score not only because the class is stacked with multiple projected franchise-changing players (our latest CBS Sports mock draft projects Washington to take BYU wing AJ Dybantsa), but also because this is the last year of the current lottery system that rewards — or at least is supposed to reward — the worst teams.
That hasn’t happened in the last seven drafts. Since the current lottery odds were introduced in 2019, the team with the league’s worst record had never actually landed the top pick. Until now. The Wizards were blatant tankers: trading for Trae Young and Anthony Davis and basically never playing them, sitting all their rookies and second-year guys in fourth quarters en route to losing 26 of their final 27 games. But it worked. There is no overstating how huge this is for the franchise.
Adding to the sudden surge of hope into what has been a largely hopeless franchise for the past decade is the fact that, as alluded to above, the lottery system is set to change next year. You can read about the proposed new one, but the key thing is that in an effort to curb tanking the three worst teams in the league will now have just a 5.6% chance at landing the No. 1 pick, while the teams that finish anywhere from the fourth worst record to the 10th worst will all have the maximum 8.1% chance.
If the Wizards finish next season with a bottom-three record, things will have gone horribly wrong. More likely, they end up in that 4-10 range, which would be the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario in which a young team adds a franchise player, starts to experience winning and in doing so lays the foundation of an identity while also maximizing their chances at another high lottery pick in 2027. At which point they would really be cooking.
Under the new lottery format, the Wizards could actually make the play-in as the East’s No. 9 or 10 seed and, even if they make the playoffs from there, still retain a 5.4% chance at the No. 1 pick (the same as the worst three records). Even as a No. 8 seed in the playoffs, they’d still get lottery balls.
No matter what direction the Wizards decide to go next season, to me, landing in this 4-10 range, hopefully closer to 10, or in one of the play-in games is the most realistic outcome, even though the second that the lottery results were revealed Washington’s projected roster for next season started making the social media rounds as if to suggest the so-called scary hours are about to start.
They’re not. Yes, there’s name value with Young and Davis, but Young, as we’ve seen for years now, is not changing your prospects all that much. Davis, in all likelihood, either won’t be healthy or will be traded.
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Even if Davis stays put (he’s made it pretty clear he would prefer to play for a contender, and the Wizards are not that), the idea that Young is suddenly going to drive winning, and Davis is going to play in 65 games, and the Wizards are going to finish as a top-five-or-six seed in an Eastern Conference that is going to be tougher than it has been in years next season is something not too far south of a pipe dream. I would put the odds of that happening far longer than getting the No. 1 pick in the first place.
It’s not to say the Wizards shouldn’t be doing cartwheels right now. They should. They now have a plethora of options, and they’re all good ones.
Wizards’ roster-building options
- Take Dybantsa or Peterson at No. 1, keep Davis and Young, and field a competitive team next season while remaining in the hunt for another (hopefully high) lottery pick in 2027.
- Take Dybantsa or Peterson at No. 1, trade Davis, and still field a competitive enough team to win a decent number of games while all but assuring yourself of finishing in the 4-10 lottery range.
- Trade the No. 1 pick, which Jake Fischer of The Stein Line has reported as a possibility (this could just be a smoke screen to see how much the Jazz, who are picking No. 2, would really be willing to pay to select Dybantsa), which would give them access to multiple picks this season and beyond (while still getting a stud at No. 2 if a trade with Utah, for example, were to be struck) to add to their already deep roster of young guns. Again, this would almost assure them of a 4-10 lottery finish and yet another good pick in 2027 in addition to whatever assets they might attain in a trade for this year’s top pick, which would be plentiful to say the least.
Again, these are all good options for a team that has been largely devoid of such a thing for the last decade. Adding Dybantsa this year, and very possibly another lottery pick next year next year, to a young core of Alex Sarr, Tre Johnson, Kyshawn George, Bilal Coulibaly, Will Riley and Bub Carrington, all of whom are 22 years old or younger, represents a bright future. To bake Young and Davis into that cake provides hope for a win-now and win-even-bigger later parlay.
The only bad decision the Wizards can make here would be to sign Davis to the kind of extension he wants. He’s 33 years old. He’s on the books for $58.5 million next season with a $62.7 million player option for ’27-28. He wants to get rid of that option and ink one last big-money deal. The Wizards should not, under any circumstances, be the team to give it to him.
Personally, I’d be on the phone right now trying to trade him. He probably doesn’t have a ton of value, which is how the Wizards got him for next to nothing in the first place (of the two first-round picks they gave up for him, one is OKC’s and will be in the late 20s, and the other is Golden State’s in 2030 with a top-20 protection, which means it will also fall in the 20s or convert to a second-rounder), but make and take all the calls.
Davis should not be part of a long-term plan. At most, he helps you compete at a reasonable level next season and then you let him decide on the player option in ’27. If he wants to walk for nothing, fine. Again, you didn’t give up that much to trade for him anyway.
Before the Wizards landed this No. 1 pick, the trade for Davis felt a little impatient, even considering the low-risk swap. The Wizards were, and are, sick of losing, and wanted to fast forward with no long-term franchise player on the roster to dream on a longer timeline anyway.
But now they’re going to get that long-term star, which means Davis should absolutely be a short timer. One year and done at the most. Move on with what is suddenly a very intriguing crop of young players. Also, if the Wizards take Peterson at No. 1, you know Young is also not part of the long-term plan. But if they take Dybantsa, Young is a wait-and-see player. He’s still young and talented enough to play it out for a bit longer than Davis.
Again, these are all good options. Potentially great ones. Things have been seriously bleak for this franchise for a long time, but the Wizards finally struck lottery gold on Sunday and are now in position to start compounding their growth back to relevance and hopefully beyond.
