The lottery balls finally answered the question that hung over the entire 2025-26 NBA season: the Washington Wizards won the 2026 NBA Draft Lottery on Sunday, May 10 in Chicago, and with it the right to draft AJ Dybantsa first overall on June 23.
Washington, Indiana, and Brooklyn all finished a league-worst 16-66 and entered the night tied at 14.0% for the No. 1 pick — the first three-way tie at the top of the lottery since 1985, the year the lottery itself debuted and the Knicks landed Patrick Ewing. Only one of the three could jump, and it was the Wizards. Brooklyn fell to sixth; Indiana's pick (which conveys to the LA Clippers) landed fifth.
The post-lottery top five: 1. Washington, 2. Utah Jazz, 3. Memphis Grizzlies, 4. Chicago Bulls, 5. LA Clippers (via Indiana). The full reshuffled board, all 60 picks, is on our 2026 NBA Draft Board.
For Washington the fit could not be cleaner. Dybantsa, the 6-9 BYU freshman wing who has been the consensus No. 1 prospect since high school, slots next to Bilal Coulibaly and Alex Sarr to give the league's youngest rebuild a jumbo-wing scorer to build the next decade around. He is the heavy favorite to hear his name called first, even as rival front offices insist there was never a true consensus No. 1 — Darryn Peterson and Cameron Boozer both walked into the cycle with No. 1 cases of their own.
This is the last lottery under the current odds structure before the league's planned anti-tanking reforms take effect, which makes Washington's jump — and the fates of Brooklyn and Indiana, who tied for the best odds and got nothing — a fitting send-off for the format. See our full 2026 Lottery Results & Explainer for the ping-pong-ball math and the team-by-team breakdown.