I rank every traded first-round pick in the NBA at some point during every offseason, and every offseason that list gets longer. When we started this tradition in 2022, there were 47 picks to rank. Fast forward to 2023 and the list grew to 56. Now that we’ve reached 2024, we’re up to 68 total picks. Here’s how those picks break down:
If there was any fear that the new collective bargaining agreement was going to scare teams into holding onto their picks, well, we can brush that aside. Making the money work is harder than ever, but once teams figure that part out, they’re going to keep packaging all of their picks for the unhappy veteran du jour. At any given time in the NBA, there are 210 theoretically available first-round picks. That figure counts every team’s pick for the next seven years, which is the furthest out a team can trade them. For the first time since this exercise began, we’ve crossed the 30% owed threshold. Of those 210 total picks, 32.3% of them have been traded.
But as always, not all draft picks are created equal. Sometimes an owed first-round pick gets you Jayson Tatum. Sometimes it gets you Romeo Langford. Our goal today is to figure out which picks have the best chance at creating Tatums and which ones are likelier to get you a Langford. Here are the criteria we use to sort them out:
One quick distinction that I’m making for the sake of my own sanity: secondary swaps will not be ranked. A secondary swap comes when a team offers swap rights in a year in which they already owe swap rights. The Suns, for example, owe swap rights on their 2026 pick to the Wizards… but have also given the Magic the right to swap picks with them wherever they land after that Washington swap… and then the Grizzlies have the right to swap with the Suns after that. We’re not jumping down that rabbit hole. The 2026 Phoenix pick will be ranked on its own.
And finally, one last thing to keep in mind here is that this is not a straight projection of how high each of these picks will ultimately be. That would frankly be impossible. We have no earthly idea what the 2031 draft order will be and it would be foolish to suggest otherwise. Rather, we are ranking the value of each outstanding pick today. Even if we can’t accurately predict the 2031 draft order, we can look at where a team is today and estimate what their long-term outlook might look like. Teams certainly do so in trade negotiations, because as we’ve covered, perception matters quite a bit here.
The basic question we are attempting to answer here is, of these 68 owed picks, which would you most want to control if you were running another team? Which picks have the best ratio of upside to risk? Which picks are we confident could be traded for a high price down the line, or perhaps even ransomed back to their original owner for a premium (we’ll get to this concept later)? The answers to these questions might be different to different teams. Some executives have more risk tolerance than others. Taking all of that into account, here are our rankings of the 68 first-round picks currently owed out through trades.
The Timberwolves might take a step back in 2026. The Jazz might take a step forward. There was a 25-win gap between these teams last season, so it’s hard to imagine, given the overall roster makeup of the teams involved here, that Utah has any reasonable chance of bridging this gap in two years. This should be an unrealized swap.
The Wizards won 15 games last season and are worse on paper now than they were in April. They are actively trying not to convey this pick, and they’re going to succeed.
The Hornets are a bit further along their rebuilding path than the Wizards, so it’s theoretically plausible that they could sneak into the Play-In Tournament and steal a playoff spot in a weak Eastern Conference, but the odds are low and the Spurs only have one more shot at getting this pick before it becomes second-rounders. It probably isn’t conveying.
Again, the Wizards are intentionally awful. This swap almost certainly doesn’t convey. But the Western Conference is so deep and Phoenix’s aging roster is in such a precarious position that it is at least reasonable to think they could have an injury-plagued 2025-26 season and land in the lottery. Once that happens, the Suns effectively serve as a second set of ping pong balls for the Wizards as the swap wouldn’t happen until after the draft order is decided. It’s probably not getting used, but that glimmer of disaster potential prevents this swap from finishing last on our list.
The good news for the Jazz? The don’t have to swap their own pick here. If the Cavaliers have a higher pick than the Timberwolves, they can extract some value out of this swap. The bad news? Cleveland is likely to be good in 2026, so this is likely only a minor leap if it’s even used.
This is one of the faker first-round picks that’s been traded in recent memory. A one-shot pick with a two-thirds chance of never conveying seven years after the trade was finalized? Yeah, that screams “we just wanted the press release to look a bit more favorable.” Who knows where the Warriors will be in 2030. If they’re bad, the Wizards don’t get the pick. If they’re good? Congratulations on a low-upside asset.
Hey, speaking of low-upside assets, Nikola Jokic recently won 48 games in a season in which Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. combined to play nine games. So long as he is a Nugget, any pick from Denver is more or less guaranteed to be in the 20s. The protections take away your upside on the off-chance he gets hurt.
A swap in 2028 holds some mystery box value from most teams, but Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum will still be in their primes at this point. Sure, the Spurs could jump a few spots with this pick, and yes, there is always the chance something messes up the Celtics, but most reasonable forecasting would tell us that Boston is probably not going to send the Spurs a very good pick in 2028. The top-1 protection is the cherry on top of this disappointing sundae.
We’re about to enter a string of “least favorable” picks. These picks almost always have limited value for the simple reason that it’s rare for any combination of three teams to be especially bad, and when they are, it’s even rarer for a team to trade one of their picks under these conditions.
As a general rule of thumb, if you’re getting one of these “least favorable” picks, you’d prefer to get it later rather than sooner. It has much more practical value as a trade chip, particularly for a role player at the deadline, than as a pick in itself.
Same deal as the first Denver pick. Jokic teams are never bad. If this one happens to be, your upside is limited by the protections.
This is another upside-limited pick, but remember, Joel Embiid does tend to miss quite a few games. Not a “you could get a lottery pick” amount, but certainly a “you could get a pick in the late teens” amount. Philadelphia just picked at No. 16. Most likely this is a late pick, but the upside is a bit higher than Denver’s.
You know the drill. This is the best of the protected Denver picks purely because the longer time horizon creates more of an opportunity for things to change, but this will still only be Jokic’s age-33 season.
The Thunder are likely to be so good that almost any swap holds value for them. Jumping from, say, No. 27 to No. 12 in a good draft would mean quite a bit to them. In all likelihood, Houston lands somewhere between the late lottery and the middle of the first round. If the Rockets were in the East this would be a much more valuable swap for the Thunder, but in the West, the chance of them getting boxed out of the Play-In Tournament and protecting their pick is just too high to rank this swap any higher.
Houston is probably going to be worse than Phoenix this season… but will Oklahoma City? This is a nifty little swap as insurance against Houston’s existing swap with the Thunder. It would obviously sting if they dropped from the lottery into the 20s, but they could potentially make some of that ground back up through Phoenix, and there is certainly enough downside risk for the Suns to envision a world in which injuries give the Rockets a reason to exercise this swap regardless of what happens with the Thunder.
The Jazz flirt with sending this pick to the Thunder every year before gutting the rotation at the deadline to protect it. Re-signing Lauri Markkanen likely means they plan to do the same this season. There’s value in the Jazz being good enough to potentially pick No. 9 or No. 10 in 2026, but let’s be honest, Danny Ainge isn’t going to play the “too good to tank” game for much longer. Either the Jazz get meaningfully better and suddenly the pick isn’t especially valuable, or they don’t, at which point they take more aggressive steps toward protecting this pick.
We’ve reached the “unprotected 2025 picks from very good teams” portion of the list. Any one of these picks could theoretically be high with the right set of disasters (see last year’s Grizzlies as an example), but we should generally assume these picks are going to come at the end of the first round. Ultimately, though, where you rank those picks is going to come down to preference. The combination of Anthony Edwards and Minnesota’s defense gives the Timberwolves a higher floor than these other teams, so they’re the least valuable of this grouping.
You could argue Minnesota’s pick is a bit more valuable than New York’s merely because the Knicks are in the East. The fear of Tom Thibodeau-induced injuries was the tiebreaker here.
Cleveland is a shade worse than New York and Minnesota, but still very good. So long as the Cavs play those two big men together their defense will have a high floor, and Darius Garland is due for bounce back year.
We’re sneaking a “least favorable” pick into this group because it’s slightly tastier than the others we’ve covered. Unlike those picks, this “least favorable” pick only relies on two teams being bad, and while both have reasons for optimism, the Pelicans are built around the injury-prone Zion Williamson while the Bucks are one of the NBA‘s oldest teams, so there is some upside behind the idea that both could have disappointing seasons.
This was a difficult pick to rank given the odd nature of the protections. It is getting conveyed regardless, but where it goes depends on where it lands. Truthfully I considered ranking the pick twice, once with the 1-4 protection and once with the 5-30 protection. It would have been a reasonable choice since Milwaukee’s 2025 first-round pick is technically held by two different teams. Ultimately, though, I landed on just ranking the pick in a vacuum. The Bucks are better than the Cavaliers, but their age gives them considerably more downside. We’ll cover that in more depth later.
This pick depends on Portland following a traditional rebuilding cycle. There’s no real upside here because of the lottery protection, but in all likelihood, their eventual return to the playoffs is going to be as a low seed. That means this pick is either going to be lost to four more bad Portland years, or it’s essentially a guaranteed pick in the 15-20 range as soon as the Blazers are competitive again. That’s not exactly a great asset, but it’s better than holding a pick you expect to come in at No. 26.
Tyrese Haliburton misses an average of 14.5 games per year and Indiana’s entire playing style revolves around his unique gifts. Like the Portland pick, the upside here is pretty limited, but Pacers just sent the Raptors the 19th pick in part because Haliburton’s health hurt their regular-season record. You’re not getting a great pick here, but you’ve got a good chance at a decent one.
We’re now far enough into the future that any unprotected swap is going to hold meaningful mystery box value, but Jalen Brunson will still be under contract at this point and New York is so desirable for players at every price point that it would probably take injuries or unforeseen decline for the Knicks to send a great pick to Brooklyn here.
The unprotected Dallas swap in 2028 edges out the Knicks swap for two reasons. First, swapping with the Thunder makes it likelier that the swap is actually exercised. We know they’ll be good. We don’t know the Nets will be. Second, and more importantly, Luka Doncic is technically not under contract for the 2027-28 season yet. We expect that to change, but it adds just enough uncertainty to look like the more valuable of these two swaps.
The 2030 Dallas swap beats out its 2028 counterpart purely for the two extra years of uncertainty. The Spurs should be good enough to use the swap even if it’s at the end of the first round, but if Doncic is still in Dallas at this point, the Mavericks will probably be very good themselves.
Again, we’re going to cover the Bucks in more depth as we get higher on the list (like, much higher). For now, we’ll just say that there is definite upside in betting against Milwaukee’s age, but Giannis Antetokounmpo will probably still be on the roster at this point. His mere presence protects against most worst-case outcomes for the Bucks.
Cleveland will probably still be good in 2028, but Donovan Mitchell has a player option for the 2027-28 season, so if he’s ready to move on before then, there’s plenty of uncertainty in play here. One way or another the Jazz will have a direction by 2028.
This obviously can’t become an especially high pick because of the protections, but there’s definite upside value in shorting the 2027 76ers simply because of age and injuries. This will be Paul George‘s age-36 season and Joel Embiid’s age-32 season. Tyrese Maxey likely protects the 76ers from landing in the bottom eight anyway, so there are plausible scenarios in which the Nets get a late lottery pick here.
This pick shares a bit of DNA with that lottery-protected Portland pick we covered earlier, but it’s a bit more valuable for a few reasons. First, the protections are lighter. Second, it’s likely to convey sooner. Third, and most importantly, there’s not much guesswork. The Kings are a team in the Play-In mix right now. There’s a degree of certainty here. This pick is protected 1-12 and the Kings just picked No. 13. If you weren’t a fan of the DeMar DeRozan addition (and I pretty emphatically was not), you’re looking at a pick in the 13-17 range this year.
This is another spiritual cousin to that Portland pick from earlier. You’re not getting a very high pick, and you’re probably waiting a bit, but the Pistons have been awful for a long time.
Now we move into the “lightly protected or unprotected picks from good teams a bit in the distance” range of the list. Dallas has the least valuable of these picks largely because of that top-two protection, but the next three teams are all in similar ranges. They should all still be good at this point barring something unexpected.
Three of the four Villanova Knicks are still under contract at this point, and the fourth (Mikal Bridges) is expected to extend down the line. New York should still be good at this point, but hey, the Knicks have given up plenty of high picks in the past, so there’s always the chance they botch this and the Nets make out like bandits.
When we were ranking the 2025 picks a bit higher in the list, the New York choice was ranked higher than Minnesota’s. We’ve flipped them in 2027 because of the two-year second apron window I’ve covered in other stories. In short: this is the year Minnesota has to start trimming payroll, so the Timberwolves look a bit less exciting than the Knicks at this point.
This is one of the most interesting outstanding picks in the NBA. We’ve covered “least favorable” picks a bit higher up… but this is the only “second-most favorable” pick out there. That grants a bit more upside, as you suddenly only need two of the three teams involved to be bad, and you have a five-year time horizon on which to trade the pick based on reputation. As you’ll see a bit later on, one of the 2029 picks involved in this situation is ranked very high, so that attachment holds value. Let’s say hypothetically that 2029 Bucks pick which we’ll cover later on comes in at No. 4 overall. Suddenly the Wizards are looking at a situation in which they either get a top-four pick or they get the more favorable of two picks that could come in as high as No. 5. That is obviously a very tantalizing asset. But we’re still five years out. Until we have a clearer picture of Milwaukee’s future, we can’t for certain where exactly that ceiling comes in. For now, the upside is still somewhat limited by the fact that it cannot be the most favorable of the three, and for it to convey into a great pick, you’d need two out of these three teams to be bad. One of those three teams is the reigning champion and another is one of the youngest teams in the current NBA and should therefore by peaking around the end of this decade. Even if you’re a Bucks doubter (and I am, as I’ll later explain), that’s still too much uncertainty to rank this pick any higher… for now. If one of these teams combusts in the next year or two, however, the circumstances change a fair bit and this pick rises in next year’s rankings.
*A previous version of this list had this pick listed at No. 58 due to an incorrect understanding of the conditions attached.
Any lightly protected Western Conference pick in the near future is going to be pretty valuable just because of how good the conference is. The Rockets just finished No. 11, and that was with the Grizzlies out of the picture and Victor Wembanyama playing what might be the worst year of his career. Will they better in 2026? Yeah, probably. But the West is so deep right now that it only really takes a few injuries for a good team to be mediocre or a mediocre team to be bad.
The Celtics are better today than the last batch of 2027 teams we covered, but ultimately in the second apron era, keeping any team together is going to be so inherently difficult that I’m inclined to take the two extra years of uncertainty over the slightly inferior teams. We covered this pick slightly two slots ago with that 2029 Blazers selection, and Boston’s healthy present is part of what mutes that pick’s value. If you assume Tatum and Brown are still in place and playing like stars at that point, then Boston’s pick should be near the bottom of the first round and suddenly Washington is looking at getting the least favorable pick between Milwaukee and Portland. By controlling the most favorable pick out of that trio, Portland is the team that stands to benefit most if the Tatum-Brown duo has been broken up by that point, so this pick, in a vacuum, outranks Portland’s even if you’d probably expect the Celtics to be better than the Blazers by 2029.
This is a very tricky pick to rank. You could argue it should be 15 spots lower based on the lottery protection and Miami’s organizational competence. But the Heat have been a Play-In team two years in a row. They’ve lost a ton of depth to free agency. They are ranked seventh or eighth in the Eastern Conference by most betting markets. It is entirely plausible that they miss the playoffs and that pick becomes unprotected in 2026, which is pretty meaningful considering Jimmy Butler‘s plans to pursue a payday in 2025 free agency. And even if the Heat do make the playoffs? Well, again, their last two first-round picks have been No. 15 and No. 18, so you’re getting a pretty good pick if their recent regular-season performance holds. It’s basically another version of that 2025 Kings pick, but with more upside.
The Cavaliers are younger than those other 2027 teams we’ve covered, but there’s more uncertainty here than elsewhere. Donovan Mitchell’s recent contract extension didn’t exactly lock him up for life. He has a 2027-28 player option, so this season will effectively be his contract year. If Cleveland hasn’t made serious strides toward championship contention by then, we go right back to the Mitchell rumor mill. That doesn’t even account for any moves Cleveland might have to make to keep him happy. If the Cavaliers disappoint in the postseason again, it’s hard to imagine them keeping both Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen. Evan Mobley is the only core Cavalier whose presence on the 2026-27 roster appears safe. They’ll get assets back for whoever they move, but uncertainty is value in the future pick market.
If the Hawks ever do trade Trae Young, their unprotected picks vault up this list. But in an Eastern Conference that is absolutely awful at the bottom, he’s enough of a floor-raiser to at least keep Atlanta in Play-In range. That has definite value, but this is a swap and given how patiently the Spurs have built around Wembanyama, they probably aren’t going to be picking so low by 2026 that this swap would jump them 10 or 15 picks. Moving up a couple is certainly meaningful, especially if it’s in the top half of the first round, but assuming Young is healthy, this probably isn’t going to be a top pick.
Another one of those picks from the lottery-protected Blazers family. The difference here is that the Bulls just can’t help themselves. A normal team with this sort of outlying pick just undergoes a full teardown and ensures it never conveys. It would be so easy for Chicago to take that approach. They badly need to tank. But this is the Bulls. They’ll definitely be bad this season. Their ownership is not going to tolerate an intentional three-year tank. Either in 2026 or 2027 they’re going to demand progress, so the Bulls will make an ill-fated Play-In push that sends the Spurs a good pick. This pick is ranked 25 spots lower if it’s held by most other teams. That’s barely hyperbole. The Jazz owe almost this exact same pick to the Thunder and it is ranked No. 52. But the Jazz know what they’re doing and the Bulls don’t.
This will be Kawhi Leonard‘s age-35 season. The Clippers only have three players under guaranteed contracts for the 2026-27 campaign: Leonard, Derrick Jones Jr. and Ivica Zubac. Sure, they could use cap space in the summer of 2026 to retool, but significant player movement rarely comes through free agency anymore. The Clippers don’t have picks or young players to trade, and it’s unclear at this moment how much trade value their veterans even have. That top-five protection is doing a lot of work here, but it certainly feels like the Thunder have a path to turning a very late 2027 pick into a pretty good one through this swap.
When I did these rankings a year ago, this pick came in at No. 3. So what’s changed? Well, everything. A year ago there was legitimate fear that 2024 would be Luka Doncic’s final year in Dallas. Since then, they’ve hit a home run on a lottery pick (Dereck Lively), landed two perfect role players (P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford), and for the past year at least have kept the Kyrie Irving drama to a minimum. They went from the lottery to the Finals. Sure, there is some reasonable skepticism here. Irving won’t be Irving in 2029. Doncic isn’t under contract. But on a macro level, the Mavericks have a great outlook for the next half-decade. This pick still has some upside, but it’s not nearly the gem it looked like it could be a year ago.
I covered this swap in more depth here and here, but the short explanation for its value is, as we keep repeating, the uncertainty baked into it. This pick comes after Anthony Edwards’ ninth season. He’s not even under contract for it. If all goes as planned in Minnesota, the Timberwolves will spend most of the intervening period contending for titles. But what if Rob Dillingham doesn’t pan out? What if they find themselves unable to make changes because Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert are earning too much? What if the next few seasons are disappointments? This is roughly the point on the career timeline for any young superstar in which his future plans are determined. If Edwards decides to leave Minnesota, this swap becomes incredibly valuable. If at any point between now and then the league thinks Edwards is going to leave Minnesota, it’s going to have incredible trade value.
The same rules apply to this pick as the last Heat pick we covered. You’re betting on two consecutive bad years. The difference is that Butler will either be in his age-37 season or off of the team by then. We’re talking about the Heat here. They’ll figure something out to set their future straight. But Miami isn’t immune from bad stretches. How do you think the Heat got Dwyane Wade, Bam Adebayo or Tyler Herro? Pat Riley won 15 games in his final season as head coach. Could they trade for a star to replace Butler at some point? Sure, but at least for the moment, they’re hamstrung by the picks they owe out in 2025 and 2027. This seems like a great chance to catch the Heat at a low point.
The upside here is considerable on the depth of the Western Conference alone. Even if Leonard and James Harden stay relatively healthy, this is not a contending-caliber roster without Paul George. If either of them gets hurt, and with Leonard that’s usually more of a “when,” the upside increases substantially. There’s so much defensive talent on this roster that the Clippers probably have a floor in the bottom half of the lottery, but that could still represent a sizable jump from wherever Oklahoma City lands.
Perhaps the most notable “high risk, high reward” pick on the board. Shorting the Lakers, in general, is a good idea. LeBron James will (probably) be retired by this point. Anthony Davis is injury-prone and getting older. There is no indication whatsoever that this front office has a coherent plan. But this is a one-shot deal. You either get the pick in 2027 or you don’t get it at all. This is a prime “Lakers rebuilding year,” but even if the Lakers don’t choose to be bad, well, there’s plenty of reason to believe they might be bad anyway. There’s genuine reason to fear that the Lakers are bad enough to land in the top four and leave you with nothing. Between 2015 and 2017, they owed a top-four protected pick out from the Steve Nash trade that landed at No. 2 overall three years in a row. When the pick became unprotected in 2018, it fell to No. 10, and the Orlando Magic, who were owed a “next allowable” pick from the Lakers, got nothing because the seven-year window had expired. By all means, bet on the Lakers to be bad. But betting on them to actually cough up a protected pick? History says that’s a scarier proposition.
All of the Cleveland uncertainty we covered in 2029 is still very much in play, but for the first time, an unprotected Cavaliers pick gets outranked by the Knicks and Timberwolves in the same year because of their youth. It’s just a shade likelier that the Knicks and Timberwolves have either aged out or blown up by 2029 than the Cavaliers have. Cleveland has so many good players who are relatively young that even if they are worse at the end of the decade, it’s hard to envision a dramatic fall to the bottom of the standings.
In the 21st century, the Knicks have given up a No. 2 pick (LaMarcus Aldridge), a No. 8 pick (Joakim Noah), a No. 9 pick (Gordon Hayward), a No. 12 pick (Dario Saric) and a No. 7 pick (Jamal Murray). Obviously, the Knicks are a far smarter organization today, but, well, history says betting against James Dolan tends to work out. This is roughly the point in New York’s expected trajectory in which things could start to go south due to age, injuries, money and a lack of leftover trade assets.
Minnesota’s fortunes are tied a bit more strongly to a single player (Edwards) than New York’s, and that player, for a variety of reasons, appears slightly less tied to his team than New York’s player (Jalen Brunson) is to his. That makes the Minnesota pick a hair more enticing.
This isn’t the best of the deep future Clipper picks (in fact it’s third), but it’s still a very good one. It’s a near-certainty that the Leonard/Harden era will be over by this point, but with so many first-round picks owed to other teams, the Clippers are going to have a hard time building a new roster to replace it. The allure of Los Angeles and the top-three protection places a bit of a cap on the value here, but it would take a completely unforeseen home run of a trade or free agent signing for the Clippers to be good in 2029.
This is the best of the owed Timberwolves picks for all of the reasons we’ve covered above. It’s valuable for the same reasons the 2030 swap is, but it’s an unprotected outright pick.
The Knicks edge out the Timberwolves in the 2031 pick race merely due to age. It’s just a bit easier to believe the Timberwolves are winning with players they currently have in 2031. Brunson will be 35 in 2031.
A gentle reminder: the Kings have picked in the lottery in 18 of the past 19 NBA Drafts. They are at the top of any organization you’d want to short over a long enough time horizon. I don’t know where the Kings will be in 2031. By then De’Aaron Fox will be 33 and Domantas Sabonis will be 35. They might be on their last legs. They might just have moved on. They might have moved on long enough ago for the Kings to have built up a new core. But I know that Sacramento’s track record screams “grab as many of their picks as you can.” If nothing else, the Spurs have Wembanyama and the Kings do not. That alone is enough for me to believe they’ll exercise this swap.
All of the same low-ceiling issues we covered with the 2026 Hawks swap apply here, but there’s a huge difference between getting the No. 11 pick and swapping for the No. 11 pick. This pick, in all likelihood, will be in the lottery, and safe lottery picks are a rare commodity no matter how limited their upside.
The Lakers are better than the Hawks, but have far more upside from a draft perspective. They’re in the Western Conference, they’re old, they have a rookie head coach and they’re pressing up against the second apron, so fortifying the roster in a trade would be difficult. Atlanta’s median outcome is probably higher, but the Lakers have more room to completely combust.
I know this pick only has a slim edge over its 2025 counterpart in terms of ranking, but the value gap is significant. By 2027 the bottom of the Eastern Conference should be better. The 2026-27 season is Young’s contract year, so if he wants out, odds are he’s traded in the 2026 offseason. It’s possible that one of Atlanta’s current youngsters pop enough to keep Young in a Hawks uniform and help the team maintain a somewhat competitive baseline, but there are no players on this roster besides Young that project as obvious future All-Stars.
This is when the Clippers picks start to look really valuable. Leonard and Harden are a year older, but the Clippers won’t have the time, asset or financial flexibility to make any major changes. The teams at the bottom of the Western Conference will presumably have taken a step forward, but many of the teams that you’d expect to take a step back like the Lakers and Warriors at least have paths to adding talent. The Clippers don’t. The median outcome here is probably a low lottery pick. The ceiling is much, much higher.
You probably have a good idea of why the Suns are featured so prominently at the top of this list, but in case you’re really, really optimistic about Phoenix’s future, here’s the breakdown:
Phoenix’s picks landing near the top of this list won’t surprise anybody. What might is the team they are competing with for the top spots.
Alright, let’s have a conversation about the Milwaukee Bucks. They are one of two teams to have four picks in the top 10, but the other, Phoenix, dominated the top of last year’s board. So, what is so tantalizing about Milwaukee’s deep future picks? Here’s the full list:
So there you have it. The Bucks are on implosion watch, and that puts the Blazers, who control their picks between 2028 and 2030, in an enviable position. This is the worst of those four top-10 picks because it is a swap and the timing is slightly less desirable than the other available swap, which we’ll cover shortly.
Phoenix’s 2030 swap is a bit more valuable than its 2028 swap largely because of Devin Booker. He is under contract with no player option for the 2027-28 season, but he’ll have to re-sign at some point to be on the team in 2030.
The 2030 Bucks pick edges out its 2028 counterpart on the basis that it allows for a bit more Giannis-related wiggle room. Maybe he stays a bit longer than we think. Maybe he stays forever, but by 2030 he’ll likely have started to decline. If the Bucks are bad in 2028, they’ll likely still be bad in 2030 because they won’t have high draft picks to fall back on. But if they are good in 2028, they still could be bad in 2030.
Here we go, folks. The single most valuable swap currently in the NBA. Those Bucks and Suns picks are tempting, but the Suns and Bucks are good right now. They’ll probably drop off, but we don’t know when and we don’t know how. But the Nets? They’ve telegraphed to the entire league how badly they want to lose right now because they gave up some of the most valuable picks on this list to get their own choices back from Houston. The Nets paid for the right to tank in 2025 and 2026. There’s no ambiguity here. There is no chance whatsoever that the Nets prioritize winning in 2025 or 2026. Their incentive to be bad obviously disappears in 2027, but it’s not always easy to go from intentionally bad to halfway decent overnight. The Nets could spend a bunch of money on veterans in 2026 free agency, but unless they land a superstar they’re probably going to at least be in the lottery. There’s a good chance it’s a whole lot higher.
One important note about 2027 for Phoenix is that Kevin Durant’s contract expires after the 2025-26 season. He’ll either be on the team in his age-37 season or he’ll be gone. Either way, if Phoenix refuses to make any major roster changes, this is the first obvious decline point. The current roster, under Budenholzer’s guidance, has pathways to winning a lot of regular-season games for the next year or two. But by the summer of 2026, the roster will have either fallen apart at the regular-season level or its playoff flaws will have been exposed beyond a doubt.
As we covered, the summer of 2026 is the unofficial Antetokounmpo pivot point. If he’s staying, we’ll know by then. If he’s moving, this is probably when it happens. If he is traded, the package will likely be built around picks that won’t have time to bear fruit in time for the 2027 draft. Both Middleton and Lopez will have reached free agency by this point, so there’s a world in which the 2027 Bucks are led by a 36-year-old Lillard and… who knows what else.
This is the best of the owed Clippers picks. It’s the first pick to come after the expiration of Leonard’s current contract. Zubac is the only player on the roster currently locked up for the 2027-28 campaign. That’s plenty of cap space for a Los Angeles team to work with, and in the past, the star-studded 2027 free agent class could have served as a life preserver for this team. But until we actually see the comeback of free agent as a vehicle for star movement, we can’t assume it’s coming back. Doncic is the best player currently slated for 2027 free agency, for instance, but if he decides to move, recent history tells us it will be through a trade, not free agency. Perhaps the new CBA’s restrictions regarding salaries in trades compels a couple of stars to use free agency to partner up, but it’s still far too early in this cycle to assume as much. For now, the 2027-28 Clippers look barren. That might change, but given all of the picks they’ve already spent, it’s going to be an uphill battle.
We’re lumping the top two spots together to answer a simple question: why have I consistently ranked the Milwaukee picks over the Phoenix picks? There’s one significant separator: the Suns have an out. If they wanted to trade Durant today for significant value, they could do so. It wouldn’t be easy. Phoenix is a second-apron team, and teams above either apron basically can’t trade with one another unless the salary going in each direction is dollar-for-dollar equal thanks to the new CBA, so the field is limited. The best teams are apron teams, and only teams with immediate championship aspirations would seek out Durant.
But we know of at least one team that was interested earlier in the offseason in Houston. I wrote in depth about why the Suns should have taken the Rockets up on that interest here. There’s another obvious suitor in one of Durant’s former teams, the Golden State Warriors, who aggressively pursued Lauri Markkanen this summer to try to re-enter the championship picture. The Warriors are locked below the first apron thanks to their offseason moves, and they’d need a third team for both salary and roster-size purposes, but there are doable constructions built around Andrew Wiggins, Jonathan Kuminga and draft capital. The point is, Durant is still good enough to draw a significant trade package. The Suns could refocus the team around Devin Booker and remain competitive moving forward.
It’s just harder to find that sort of pivot for the Bucks. Could they… trade Lillard to the Heat? Maybe, but remember, Miami wasn’t offering Portland enough to even seriously engage a year ago, and Lillard is worth meaningfully less today. Tyler Herro and a couple of draft picks aren’t saving the Bucks. Milwaukee looked into Lopez trades this offseason. If there was a good one out there they would have taken it. Middleton has missed an average of around 30 games per year since winning the title in 2021. He can definitely still help almost any contender. He’s just too much of a risk to draw a great trade package.
This version of the Bucks might be able to contend for another two or three years. This year might be it. It might already be over. But whenever it ends for this version of the team, it’s ending. There’s no backdoor short of, say, finding a star in second round of the draft or taking an enormous chance on a premium talent that comes with injury or off-court risks. They’re old. They have no picks. They’re expensive. The only real hope the Bucks have for avoiding a disaster at the end of this decade is loyalty out of Antetokounmpo. Is that possible? Sure. He hasn’t left yet, after all, and by all indications he loves Milwaukee. But he’s told us himself that he doesn’t want to play for a team that can’t win, and the Bucks are going to become that sort of team at some point in the near future. So either he changes his mind, or those Bucks picks are going to become the best outstanding draft assets in the NBA.
The last thing we need to note where this Bucks pick is concerned is the attachment to picks that originate in Boston (ranked No. 32 on this list) and Portland (ranked No. 34 on this list). As we covered in those sections, the Wizards receive the second-most favorable of those three picks and the Blazers receive the best and worst of them. You could argue that condition should diminish the value of this Bucks pick. If the Bucks are awful in 2029, Portland is guaranteed a high pick. However, if the Bucks are bad in 2029 and either the Blazers or Celtics are as well, Portland could wind up sending a very good pick to Washington even if it gets to keep a better one. That does represent meaningful value. But ultimately, it is value that I chose to reflect in the ranking of Portland’s 2029 pick. One way or another, the Portland Trail Blazers will get a great pick if the 2029 Bucks are bad. Washington might stand to benefit as well, but if we are ultimately ranking the value of the owed picks themselves, Milwaukee’s 2029 pick in a vacuum is the best one out there.
There are two picks we intentionally left off of the list because, while they were traded, they were traded back to their original team. Those picks belong to the 2025 and 2026 Brooklyn Nets. However, we should still cover them because they represent a few important philosophical developments within the league.
For the right to get those choices back, the Nets essentially traded four picks: No. 53, No. 26, No. 5 and No. 2 on this list. That is obviously an extremely steep price. Where would those two Nets picks have ranked had they not been traded? Well, it’s hard to say. They told the world that they only made the Mikal Bridges trade because this Rockets trade was on the table. That suggests that they would have kept trying, even if fruitlessly, to win had they not had a path to getting their own picks back.
This is where it becomes a matter of opinion. Personally, I don’t believe that reporting on Brooklyn’s plans. That isn’t a comment on the veracity of the reporters. It’s just NBA PR 101. It looks better for the Nets to say “we only made this controversial trade with our crosstown rival because of a golden opportunity another team presented us with” than it does to say “we had no immediate path to winning and had to trade our best player while we still could.” It was credibly reported that Bridges not only asked for a trade, but demanded to go to the Knicks specifically. That suggests he would have made things uncomfortable had the Nets kept him. Even if he hadn’t, it would have frankly been irresponsible of the Nets not to make this trade considering where they were. They turned a non-All-Star into five unprotected Knicks picks. That’s not a trade offer so much as a bailout. The Nets were going nowhere. The Knicks offered salvation. I don’t believe they would have turned that down with or without the Houston trade on the table.
That was my opinion, and it’s why I gave the Rockets a poor grade for the trade itself. Under those conditions, I would have ranked these two Nets picks at the top of this list (though in hindsight, I’d probably grade the Rockets a bit more favorably). The Nets are going to be one of the four or five worst teams in the NBA over the next two seasons. Getting those unprotected picks would be a potential Brown-and-Tatum level boon. I also recognize that my opinion defies the widespread reporting. It’s also worth noting that I’m publishing this list in September, when we have a far better idea of what teams will look like than we do in June, when this reporting came out.
Houston might have blinked at Brooklyn’s threat of keeping Bridges, and they surely liked the idea of turning two draft assets into four, but there was another important reason they chose to make this trade. As was reported when the trade was made, the Rockets are interested in trading for either Kevin Durant or Devin Booker at some point in the near future. Owning Phoenix’s draft picks gives them an undeniable leg up should either of those two become available. The Rockets, in essence, control Phoenix’s ability to tank, and can effectively ransom it back to the Suns. At some point in the near future, the Suns are going to realize they don’t have an immediate path to championship contention. When that time comes, the Rockets can tell them that their only path to a traditional rebuild lies in giving them one or both of their superstars.
In a way, the Rockets just did this to the Nets. Brooklyn needed its own picks in order to tank. The Rockets gave them those picks in exchange for picks they perceived as better. But now that so many picks league-wide are owned by someone other than their original owner, it’s worth wondering if more teams will try to follow the Rockets model. Say, for instance, you want to trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Might you approach Portland first to try to get Milwaukee’s picks for that effort? Could the Bucks use the threat of potentially trying to win to drive the value of their own picks down in future negotiations as the Nets potentially did?
What has become abundantly clear in this age of owed picks is that none are more valuable than your own. The Nets-Rockets-Suns saga is showing us just how creatively that value can be weaponized, and that’s going to inform just how valuable many of these picks turn out to be.
