Six days from now, the 2026 NBA Draft Lottery determines which franchise picks first. The 2026 NBA Draft Combine opens the same day at Wintrust Arena in Chicago. Darryn Peterson walks into both with more slot value at risk than any prospect in the field. The Kansas Jayhawks freshman entered last fall as the preseason No. 1 favorite for the 2026 NBA Draft. He has since been mocked at No. 2 to the Indiana Pacers by ESPN's Jonathan Wasserman and No. 3 to the Brooklyn Nets by The Ringer. AJ Dybantsa has reclaimed the consensus top spot. The reason Peterson is no longer there is medical, and the timeline is specific.
The slide started in September 2025, before Peterson played a college minute. After a Kansas preseason conditioning camp run by head coach Bill Self, Peterson was hospitalized for a full-body cramping episode he later described as 'a traumatic experience.' He said the cramping returned in waves through the fall. Bill Self's preseason boot camp has been part of the Kansas program since 2003 and has a reputation across college basketball as one of the most punishing in the country. The hospitalization is the data point NBA teams keep returning to in pre-draft interviews, because every subsequent absence in Peterson's college season traces back to the same neuromuscular pattern.
The cascade of missed games reads like a doctor's chart. A sensitive hamstring kept Peterson out for seven consecutive games from November 11 through December 2. Quadriceps cramping cost him road games against Towson on December 16 and Davidson on December 22. An ankle sprain in the second half against Colorado knocked him out of the next one. A flu-like illness scratched him from the Kansas matchup with No. 1 Arizona. Final tally: 11 missed games out of 27, with another seven appearances under 25 minutes. Peterson played meaningful basketball in roughly nine games all year. NBA front offices have told reporters the combine medical evaluation, not the on-court workout, will decide where he is selected.
In late January, Peterson benched himself at halftime of a road win over Oklahoma State. He played 18 minutes and led Kansas with 23 points anyway. A fan video of him sitting alone on the bench in the second half went viral within hours. Kansas issued a formal statement pushing back on the framing that Peterson and Bill Self were at odds. Bill Self told reporters the situation was 'not a black-and-white' one and defended Peterson's media silence. Peterson's social-media response to the criticism was a single line: 'Been an anti-social loner my whole life.' He later told reporters: 'If I could have been out there every game this year, I would have.'
The argument for Peterson at No. 1 still exists in the per-minute numbers. He averaged 20.2 points, 4.2 rebounds and 1.6 assists across 16 appearances and shot 43.8 percent from the floor. He led the Kansas Jayhawks in scoring despite missing more than 40 percent of the schedule and posted twelve 20-point games. The argument against him is structural. NBA front offices have built their last decade of player evaluation around three-and-D wing scoring, and Peterson's calling card coming out of high school was downhill explosiveness — first step, vertical jump, lateral burst. None of those traits look the same after a hamstring strain that takes seven weeks to clear.
The 2026 NBA Draft Combine runs May 10 through May 17 in Chicago, with the lottery televised that same day. Seventy-three prospects have been invited and Peterson is on the list. Each player completes a physical exam, submits a full medical history, sits for team interviews and runs anthropometric and athletic-performance testing. The medical workup is the only part that matters in his case. The Washington Wizards, Indiana Pacers and Brooklyn Nets each enter the lottery with 14 percent odds at the No. 1 pick. If any of the three wins the top slot and the medical comes back clean, Peterson is the most likely choice over Dybantsa for at least one of those front offices, per ESPN and CBS Sports reporting.
The 2026 rookie scale puts the No. 1 pick at roughly $11.4 million in year one and approximately $50 million across the four-year contract. The No. 3 pick comes in around $9.2 million in year one and $40 million across four. The contractual gap is real but modest. The downstream gap is not. The Designated Rookie Extension — the supermax track that lets a franchise pay its first-round pick a higher percentage of the salary cap on his second deal — is harder to qualify for at the back of the lottery. A flagged medical on May 10 does not just move Peterson's slot. It changes which franchise drafts him, what they can pay him in 2030, and whether the September boot camp at Kansas is remembered as a footnote or a turning point.