NBA Draft winners and losers: Loads of talent, the promise of youth, and, oh, those Michigan men

The 2026 NBA Draft had a pretty tough act to follow, coming less than 24 hours after one of the 75 greatest players in league history got dealt in the middle of the night. But what Tuesday’s first round lacked in blockbuster shock and suspense, it made up for through sheer depth of talent, as one of the most highly touted crops of prospects in ages rose, smiled, dapped up Adam Silver, and strode its way into the big leagues.

What follows is a stab at a first draft of history — a thumbnail sketch of who had a pretty good first night of the 2026 draft, and who might wind up looking back at the evening wistfully, and perhaps with some regret.

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There will be more winners than losers, because for one thing, hope should spring eternal on draft night, and for another, I am a big ol’ kind-hearted softy. (Also because, if we’re being honest, I can only feel so comfortable speaking with authority about a group of young people I have yet to see play NBA basketball.)

We begin at, well, the beginning:

I don’t know if first overall pick AJ Dybantsa will be a better pro than Darryn Peterson, Cameron Boozer or Caleb Wilson; truth be told, I’m not really convinced that anybody knows that right now. What I do know, though, is that the BYU standout instantly becomes the Wizards’ most exciting prospect since John Wall in 2010 — and potentially, as longtime D.C. scribe David Aldridge recently put it, “the kind of star the Wizards haven’t had around here since Chris Webber’s brief tenure in D.C.”

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That tenure, by the way, ended in 1998 — nearly a decade before Dybantsa was born.

The 6-foot-9 über-athlete gives the Wizards a newfound level of electricity on the wing, slotting between recent top picks Alex Sarr and Kyshawn George and even-more-recent veteran star acquisitions Anthony Davis and the just-re-upped Trae Young in what promises to be a drastically changed — and potentially significantly better — Washington lineup. He represents a higher class of hope than any of the prospects previously picked during Washington’s years-long teardown and rebuild, the kind of must-see TV…

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Author : Dan Devine

Publish date : 2026-06-24 05:38:00

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