Wild NBA Draft Lottery night opens door to blockbuster trade possibilities

CHICAGO — Well, the NBA Draft Lottery gods have a sense of humor.

So much for the idea of Cooper Flagg going to a 20-win team. Instead, a statistically improbable Dallas Mavericks-San Antonio Spurs-Philadelphia 76ers-Charlotte Hornets top four upended all our previous assumptions about what might happen in the lead-up to the NBA Draft. The odds of the Mavs and Spurs landing 1-2 were 1 in 1,000; the Mavs-Spurs-Sixers combo in the top three was 1 in 10,000.

The winning team, Dallas, hadn’t even bothered to have lead executive Nico Harrison on site, so skimpy were its 1.8 percent odds of winning. Instead, assistant GM Matt Riccardi and former Mavs All-Star Rolando Blackman were on the dais posing for photos afterward.

Even the participants were shocked at the franchise-altering twists of this particular lottery. “This s—‘s easy,” cracked one beaming exec from a team that lucked into a spot near the top.

Meanwhile, another improbable lottery happening repeated from previous cycles: The Eastern Conference can’t win, and the Southwest Division can’t lose. The Atlanta Hawks won the 2024 lottery in perhaps the least compelling recent year for doing so, but the East was shut out of the top two in the more anticipated 2025 drawing … just like it was in 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Other than the weak 2024 crop, that hasn’t happened to the West since 2014.

As for the Southwest, its five teams now have six different top-two finishes in the last seven drawings dating to 2019, air-dropping Ja Morant, Victor Wembanyama, Jalen Green, Zion Williamson and the top two picks for Dallas and San Antonio this year into the division. Every team in the division has now landed in the top two in the last eight drafts, plus the division had six other top-five picks in that span that produced Luka Dončić, Jaren Jackson, Jr., Amen Thompson, Jabari Smith Jr., Stephon Castle and Reed Sheppard.

I can’t emphasize enough: This changes everything.

The possibility of trades at the top of the draft just increased exponentially. When we thought the rebuilding teams would end up with the top three picks, we figured there wouldn’t be much action; teams like the Washington Wizards or Utah Jazz or Charlotte Hornets would just select a player and keep on rebuilding.

Instead, three teams that are on much more of a win-now trajectory — Dallas, San Antonio and Philadelphia — own the top three picks. Concurrent with that is talk surrounding Giannis Antetokounmpo’s future in Milwaukee and the possibility that the Boston Celtics may suddenly have to reconsider their hugely expensive roster in light of what appears to be a devastating injury to star forward Jayson Tatum.

The Mavs, in particular, seem like a team that might want to play ball in the trade market. Flagg is a generational talent, but Dallas’ win-now trajectory around Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis could make it hard to pass on the idea of adding Giannis to the mix. On the flip side, Flagg would allow an aging, crumbling Bucks roster to reset for the next generation.

The two sides would have to jump through some salary-cap hoops given the tax-apron position of both, including possibly waiting a month after Flagg signs his rookie contract to execute a deal. He’ll be on the cap for $13.8 million once he signs, making a package of Flagg and some other mid-sized contracts (say, P.J. Washington, Daniel Gafford, Jaden Hardy and Dwight Powell) for Antetokounmpo a possibility.

Of course, there’s a question of positional fit with either Flagg or Antetokounmpo in Dallas next to Davis, especially if Davis insists on playing power forward, which brings up two other possibilities.

One is trading Davis and changing the Mavs’ entire timeline to fit around Flagg and Dereck Lively II. Irving is already out with a torn ACL, and Dallas controls its 2026 first-round pick; would it be ridiculous to now Ctrl+Z their way out of their Luka-trade silliness and into a different superstar era? Surely they’d have plenty of interest in picks and talent if they made Davis available.

The other avenue, we must whisper, is asking Boston about Jaylen Brown. Brown is a much easier positional fit next to Davis and Lively, but he’s owed $236 million over the next four seasons, and the Celtics’ roster gets frighteningly expensive next season. Would Boston mind resetting around a New England native and waiting out a gap year if Tatum needs it to recover? For that matter, would Dallas do this unless it also had considerable capital coming back in addition to Brown?

Of course, any bidding war for Antetokounmpo or Brown or Davis is likely to get crowded in a hurry. That’s because the two other teams that moved up, San Antonio and Philadelphia, have the opportunity to be significant trade players themselves.

The Spurs could always select Rutgers guard Dylan Harper with the second pick, but the San Antonio backcourt looks crowded with midseason pickup De’Aaron Fox and Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle. Could the Spurs put this pick in play, along with the contracts of Jeremy Sochan, Harrison Barnes and Keldon Johnson, and perhaps one or two other goodies, to try to pair a monstrous frontcourt of Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama?

On the other hand, is San Antonio’s asset haul already so rich — including Castle, Sochan, a lottery pick at No. 14 from Atlanta, a 2027 unprotected Hawks pick and four future swaps — that the Spurs could trade for Giannis without including the second pick, as one rival front-office member suggested to me? (Any Spurs package would likely include Johnson and Barnes as matching salary, although Devin Vassell is another possibility.)

Similarly, Philadelphia has the third pick and would seem on track to add either Baylor guard V.J. Edgecombe or Rutgers forward Ace Bailey … except the Sixers’ backcourt already has a young All-Star in Tyrese Maxey and last year’s most productive rookie in Jared McCain, and the Sixers timeline isn’t friendly for a project like Bailey.

Thus, might Philadelphia dangle this pick, along with an unprotected 2028 LA Clippers’ first and the Sixers’ own first in 2031, as a magic wand that turns Paul George (still owed three years and $162 million) into either Giannis or Davis? Can you imagine the other side of this swap, in which a rebuilt Dallas has two of the top three picks and resets around Flagg and Edgecombe (from nearby Baylor)?

Further down in the draft, smaller pieces of intrigue remain:

• The New Orleans Pelicans fell to seventh and are the mystery meat of this transaction cycle, depending on what new lead exec Joe Dumars decides to do with Zion Williamson.

• The Brooklyn Nets have long been rumored as an Antetokounmpo pursuer, but their fall to No. 8 combined with the rise of Dallas, San Antonio and Philly was notably unhelpful in that regard. Perhaps it’s time for Plan B?

• The Houston Rockets’ drop to 10th with an unprotected pick from the Phoenix Suns means that selection likely is in play, given the Rockets’ push for contention and limited need for another young player.

• Similarly, the Portland Trail Blazers dropped to 11th and don’t need another developmental player; the Blazers could be players with that pick, especially if it helps them move off crushing contracts for Jerami Grant and/or Deandre Ayton.

Finally, the lottery leaves us with two small bits of future-pick housekeeping. First, Philadelphia kept its top-six protected pick owed to the Oklahoma City Thunder — an improbable feat for those who were in the drawing room, as the Sixers’ odds of hanging on to it were down to 12 percent after Dallas and San Antonio were drawn first and second. That means the Sixers will owe the Thunder a top-four protected first-rounder in 2026.

Second, the Sacramento Kings landed at No. 13 and thus conveyed their first-round pick from the Kevin Huerter trade to Atlanta — something that might not have happened if the Kings had lost their final regular-season game and won Dallas’ lottery numbers in the year-end random drawing. Free of that obligation in future years, the Kings can now trade up to five future firsts in any blockbuster swap (four of their own and one from the Minnesota Timberwolves).

Nonetheless, the main event here is the flipping of the apple cart at the top of the lottery and what it means for the league’s offseason trade cycle. Sure, it’s possible the Mavs, Spurs and Sixers just make picks with their newfound riches. It just seems much, much, much more possible that we get trades at the top of the draft board than it did when the week began.

(Photo of Rolando Blackman: David Banks / Imagn Images)

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