The 2026 NBA Draft Lottery, held Sunday, May 10, 2026, at McCormick Place in Chicago, opened with three teams sharing the very top of the odds board. The Washington Wizards, the Indiana Pacers, and the Brooklyn Nets each carried a 14 percent chance at the No. 1 pick — the maximum the league's flattened system allows. One premise worth correcting up front: those three did not share 14 percent because their records were tied. Their records were distinct — Washington 17-65, Indiana 19-63, Brooklyn 20-62 — and the equal 14 percent is a rule of the flattened odds, which hands the same top chance to whichever three teams finish with the worst records, tied or not. When the envelopes were opened, Washington won the No. 1 pick, the first time since the NBA flattened its odds before the 2018-19 season that the team with the league's outright worst record actually landed the top selection.
The mechanics of how three teams share the top odds are the part most fans never see. Under the system the NBA adopted in 2019, the three worst teams each receive an identical 14 percent shot at No. 1 — a deliberate change from the old descending structure of 25, 19.9, and 15.6 percent that rewarded the single worst record. The lottery itself is run with 14 ping-pong balls drawn four at a time, producing 1,001 possible four-number combinations; 1,000 of those are assigned to the 14 lottery teams. A 14 percent team gets exactly 140 of those 1,000 combinations. The three bottom teams therefore hold 140 combinations apiece, 420 in total, regardless of whether they finished tied or, as in 2026, two games apart.
So where do tiebreakers actually come in? Not at the top in 2026 — because nothing up there was tied. The NBA's tiebreaker process matters when two teams finish with the same record and have to be separated for seeding, and it is conducted not on lottery night but in advance, by random drawing at the league office in Secaucus, New Jersey, overseen by NBA league operations. For tied lottery teams, the rule is to merge their combinations and split them as evenly as possible; when the math does not divide cleanly — an odd leftover combination that cannot be halved — the random draw decides who gets the extra combination and the higher seed. For tied non-lottery teams, the draw simply sets pick order. That is the genuine coin-flip layer of the system, and in 2026 it operated below the top three, not at it.
The 2026 lottery had two real record ties to break. The Utah Jazz and the Sacramento Kings both finished 22-60, knotted for the fourth-best odds at 11.5 percent; the New Orleans/Atlanta and Dallas slots both sat at 26-56. Utah won its drawing over Sacramento for the No. 4 seed, with the Kings dropping to No. 5. That result carried a hidden consequence: by locking into the fourth-best odds, the Jazz guaranteed they could not fall outside the top eight in the lottery, which protected a pick that would otherwise have conveyed to the Oklahoma City Thunder had Utah's selection landed ninth. Ties in the draft order are not cosmetic; they move real assets, and the Jazz's coin-flip win was worth a first-round pick.
When the lottery balls actually fell, the order at the top came out: Washington at No. 1, Utah jumping to No. 2, Memphis at No. 3, Chicago at No. 4, and the LA Clippers (via Indiana) at No. 5, with Brooklyn at No. 6. Indiana and Brooklyn, the two teams that had shared the top 14 percent with Washington, did not win the jump — a reminder that equal odds do not mean equal outcomes, and that a 14 percent chance fails 86 percent of the time. Washington was the one team of the three that beat those odds, and it did so as the franchise that had finished dead last.
The Washington result is historically notable on its own terms. Since the league flattened the odds in 2019 — explicitly to discourage tanking by stripping the worst team of its old 25 percent edge — no team with the league's outright worst record had ever won the No. 1 pick, until the Wizards did it in 2026. It was Washington's first No. 1 selection since John Wall in 2010. The flattened system was designed to make being the very worst team a poor strategy; the 2026 outcome is the rare case where the worst team got the top reward anyway, against the odds the system was built to impose.
For the draft itself, the result set the stage for the No. 1 debate that has defined the class. Washington, having won the pick, now holds the choice between AJ Dybantsa and Darryn Peterson — reporting indicates the Wizards narrowed their board to those two, with Peterson said to prefer Washington. The Jazz at No. 2, the Grizzlies at No. 3, and the Bulls at No. 4 fill out the consensus top tier behind them. Every domino of June 23 traces back to a Chicago ballroom in May, where three teams with the league's worst records and identical 14 percent tickets watched one of them — the only one that had finished dead last — finally cash.