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This is a chaotic week in the basketball world.
The transfer portal is churning. Friday is the NBA Draft declaration deadline, and a handful of potential first rounders — Duke’s Patrick Ngongba, UConn’s Braylon Mullins, and both Florida’s Alex Condon and Thomas Haugh — have already elected to return to college. Others remain undecided, weighing NIL offers against draft-slot expectations. The Portsmouth Invitational just wrapped up, quietly reshuffling the second round. Front offices are still trying to sort out who’s actually in this class. At least they know the draft order, now that the NBA has determined tiebreakers.
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Oh and by the way, the Pistons, Celtics, Spurs, Knicks, and Nuggets all just dropped one of their first two games at home in the first round.
So this mock matches the wild mood. We’re maximizing the chaos. What happens if all three teams with the 14% flattened odds fall out of the top four? What happens if — gulp — the Thunder move into the top four? Here’s my full two-round mock draft with analysis for every single pick. Let’s get to it:
(Henry Russell/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
AJ Dybantsa, 6-9, BYU freshman forward
Artūras Karnišovas and Marc Eversley got fired. And Billy Donovan decided to decline his option as head coach. But what really changes? The team felt no different under them than it did with Gar Forman and John Paxson leading the front office. The common denominator: The Reinsdorf family is still in charge. But maybe all they really need is some lottery luck to escape the middle. If the Bulls are lucky enough to move up from the ninth-best odds, it’d be hard to imagine them taking anyone but Dybantsa, who led the nation in scoring as a freshman by averaging 25.5 points for a top-25 team.
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At 6-foot-9, players his size are not supposed to move with the herky-jerky elasticity that Dybantsa does. He can dunk over defenders. He can stop on a dime and fade away from midrange. And he can catch fire from behind the line too. BYU head coach Kevin Young said Dybantsa’s scoring talent is “in rare air with some of the greats.” Over the course of his…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/nba-mock-draft-30-darryn-peterson-to-the-thunder-heres-what-happens-if-the-lottery-brings-us-chaos-152543424.html
Author : Kevin O'Connor
Publish date : 2026-04-22 15:25:00
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