This June, in Manhattan, they had a parade for the winners in the world—later in the month, in Brooklyn, an event for those who lose. But not all losers are alike: the NBA draft lottery uses weighted odds determined by last season’s record, meaning that some teams—the Washington Wizards, the Utah Jazz—have in a sense won, converting their losses during the ’25–26 season into top picks. Other teams—the Memphis Grizzlies, the Chicago Bulls—also won, through luck advancing in the selection order. In a draft class already described as historically talented, these four teams are our lottery champions. Starting next year, the NBA is reforming the lottery to eliminate tanking, meaning that these are the last four teams that will straightforwardly benefit from some degree of intentional losing.
If the Wizards and Jazz have transformed loss into gain, then the Brooklyn Nets are losers ten times over: they lost last season, putting up the third worst record in the NBA; they lost in the draft, falling from tied-best odds of the first overall pick down to sixth; they lost last year’s draft, falling to eighth and using all five of their first round picks—the most ever in the first round—on players who seem incapable of stopping the losing; they lost historically, falling dramatically from the heights of their short-lived KD–Kyrie–Harden super team of ’21 and ’22; and they lost culturally, sharing a city, as they do, with the champion New York Knicks.
The Indiana Pacers, too, are losers in their own way. After beating the Knicks in the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals and taking the Oklahoma City Thunder to Game 7 of the NBA Finals, their star player, Tyreese Haliburton, tore his Achilles tendon. Without him they lost the deciding game, and their losses continued for all of the next season, pulling them into a tie with Brooklyn and Washington for the first pick. But then, thanks to a trade in the middle of this season, they had to surrender their pick to the LA Clippers because, having fallen to fifth, they lost the protections placed on the pick in the trade (a standard procedure: many picks are lottery protected, i.e. top four protected, as was the case with this Pacers’ pick), and instead walked out of the first round of the draft with nothing.
Still, next year, with Haliburton and his Achilles whole, the Pacers will have more or less the same team that took them to the finals two years prior; the Nets’ core (with the addition of former Knick Julius Randle) remains largely the same as the one that won 23 percent of their games last year, offering little more than hope that their rookies will continue to develop to sustain their fans. Completing this unfortunate troika is the team that won the rights to the seventh pick: the Sacramento Kings, one of the league’s laughingstocks, failed to realize their 45.2 percent chance at a top-four pick—the brief excitement of the ’22-23 “Beam Team” (so named because after every home win the fans would chant “light the beam” until a player hit a large purple button sending an equally purple beam of light shooting up from the arena rooftop into outer space) faded, the Kings are bad again and, so it seems, will continue to be.
But its harsh lessons in luck and implications for futurity notwithstanding, what actually is the draft? At its most abstract, the draft is simply a convocation of middlemen-orbited teenagers at the Barclays Center, who, at the discretion of other men in rooms far away, will very soon be called up on stage to put on a hat and respectfully embrace a very tall, very pale man, at which point someone will take a photograph. The spectacle of the draft is the completion of a causal chain whose origin sits far out of view, like light from celestial objects that may have already blinked out. This is to say that the draft is an industry event presented as public spectacle. In this sense the draft is broadly analogous to the Oscars, albeit without its cultural impact or its sheen, an Oscars at which the award for Best Original Score and production credit for a future film could be packaged and traded for Best Supporting Actress.
At the draft, each team is allowed to select the rights to sign an NBA player to a rookie contract. This rookie contract, and the entire draft process, is regulated by the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NBA and the players’ association (NBPA). A player drafted need not sign—the team has only acquired the rights to sign him; he cannot be compelled to play for them—but this doesn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened publicly since the millennium. Players do occasionally attempt to influence the process by expressing strong feelings or refusing workouts and interviews, but in the main the player plays for who has taken him.
The order in which teams select the most consequential picks (pace stars like Brunson and Jokic picked later on or in the second round) was this year for the last time determined by the aforementioned weighted lottery. In a league with a byzantine salary-cap system that includes metaphorical salary aprons, frozen draft picks, Bird Rights, taxpayer and non-taxpayer mid-level exceptions, traded player exceptions, disabled player exceptions, biannual exceptions, and free agencies restricted and unrestricted—in short, in a league that demands of its most ardent followers an ad-hoc fluency with contract law and basic accounting (is it a coincidence that some of the most incisive basketball commentators are former lawyers?)—the new draft lottery system debuting next year is yet another bit of added complexity to be mastered. But those are next year’s rules. This year we still have our normal draft, the expectant soon-to-be players and their families, and the promise of the interactive and immersive luxury-fan-experience that the Barclays Center and the NBA provide.
Walking through the Barclays Center’s CLEAR-branded security gates on draft night, one gets the sense that we ourselves—the fans—are the real stars. At almost every step, we’re invited to take part in some prop- or appurtenance-based activity that would generate digital content: Play a claw-game and take a photo with what is, allegedly, the Rookie of the Year trophy in glass box; elsewhere, “NBA Experience” guests, a category of some confusion as we are all at what could be construed as an if perhaps not the NBA experience, are invited to take photographs with one of the many extant Larry O’Brien Championship Trophies. Was this one on loan or was it fabricated for this event? I could not find answers. Our trophy, named in commemoration of the former Postmaster general and assuredly the only NBA commissioner to be an eyewitness to the Kennedy assassination, is hoisted by successive fans while crowds on the concourse mill by. Multiple enterprising freeloaders stand in front of the taped-off plinth and trophy, their accomplices taking photos of them with the statue in the background as it is reset by the guards. The sign in front of the line to the trophy reads that this specific NBA experience is presented by Doordash.
Spending so much of my time attending to various advertisements and the comic incongruency of various corporate sponsorships, I worried I was playing the now-hackneyed part of ’80s or ’90s novelist decrying the psychic catastrophe of muzak, but I came to appreciate those authors’ plight when I encountered the Jake From State Farm Funko Pop. Not everyone would be able to receive a Jake From State Farm Funko Pop, but everyone would have a chance to win one. The Jake From State Farm Funko Pop is smiling, holding beneath his large head a cup bearing his name, JAKE, for those who don’t know or have forgotten it, and on the corner of his iconic red shirt is printed, in a tasteful size, the State Farm logo.
Here is an unofficial dress code: The fans in jerseys or other team apparel—the spread changes depending on who has the top picks, and tonight there are more Wizards fans than one typically sees at sparsely attended games in DC, plus the perennial Nets and Knicks fans—while everyone who is not here voyeuristically is dressed in a more formal manner. The media members and NBA employees typically wear suit jackets with some variation of khaki pants. They all have lanyards on. Team owners and agents tend to wear ugly blazers or full suits. The agents have a look of pride; the owners, mostly part-owners and their families, have a look of celebration. After their team has made their pick, the owners can be seen on the concourse handing out the draft’s hat—this year with the team logo bedazzled—to their children. The families of players are almost all in somewhat nicer suiting, typically matching, and are taller than everyone else.
No immediately consequential trade happened at this draft, though if one had I’m not sure how many in the stadium would have noticed. Since the early 2010s, the NBA’s entertainment product has become increasingly bifurcated between the actual game of basketball and the business of the NBA itself as the attraction: ceaseless commentary, rampant speculation, the augury of media insiders who can both scry the humors and temperaments of various star players and be the first to tweet about it. It’s now common, even cliche, to observe that the NBA is a soap opera with a sports league attached. Perhaps the number of games played and the explosive athleticism required to play them at the highest level are to blame. It’s a stock refrain among TV commentators that playoff basketball is a different beast from the eighty-two-game slog of the regular season sport. This might explain why the average fan, or at least the average younger fan, cares more about the gossip on podcasts and Twitter, the melodramatics of trade requests, than the often-meaningless basketball games in which their team, its star player sitting because of soft-tissue injury concerns, is trying to beat a team endeavoring to lose for draft lottery purposes. Suddenly breaking news, such as Giannis Antetokounmpo’s alleged displeasure with the management of the Milwaukee Bucks, starts to seem more compelling and perhaps more important to the game of basketball than the actual game of basketball.
Alongside the increasing irrelevance of regular season basketball and the social media- and podcast-driven popularity of speculation and gossip-mongering surrounding the psychodrama of the league’s most famous players, there is ascendant a new class of NBA commentator—more charitable people might even call them sports journalists—whose job is to relay to their eager audience an indistinguishable swill of rumor and insider information disguised as news before it has been sent to anyone else. Some of these people also do more typical reporting, while others serve as clearinghouses or reputation launderers for front offices and sports agencies; almost none actually comment on the game of basketball itself. The great news-breaker of the Twitter age was Adrian Wojnarowski, known as “Woj,” and his scoops, such as they were, were known as “Woj bombs.” Wojnarowski may indeed be the progenitor of this type: Originally a sports columnist of the then-typical mold, he began to shift his writing to a news-breaking, access-journalism model, before eschewing article-writing and analysis altogether in favor of online scoop-hunting and trade-announcing, beginning with his leaks of the most significant picks of the 2011 draft. But Wojnarowski suddenly and rather shockingly retired in 2024, in part inspired by a colleague’s funeral at which other colleagues and professional contacts were conspicuously absent. In an interview about his decision, he said: “Nobody gives a shit. Nobody remembers in the end. It’s just vapor.”
Wojnarowski was quickly replaced at ESPN by his biggest rival, Shams Charania. Shams (the leading news-breakers are as a rule mononymic) had in fact been given his start by Wojnarowski before becoming his competition. Where Wojnarowski, despite the many fair knocks against him, had an endearingly bumbling, avuncular quality, Shams’s monomaniacal focus and his abstention from the older model of sports journalism (coming up as he did in a system totally oriented around Twitter and naked brand promotion and access) are far more sinister. Part of it may be the way he names and “shouts out” the agents of every deal he reports, but more consequential is his commitment to leaking every story possible. Shams’s leaks have allegedly affected betting markets, a seemingly routine act of market manipulation in our metastatic stage of sports gambling made more worrisome by the spuriousness of some of Shams’s “stories” and his professional relationship with FanDuel.
On draft night, Shams—newly working for ESPN—is on his best behavior. Looking down from my seat in the nosebleeds—behind the banners commemorating the Nets’ two ABA championships—I see him separated from the main table of ESPN analysts, perched over a small desk, his laptop open as he frantically texts. There is a special separate camera trained just on him, and it looks a bit like he has been exiled to the kids’ table. Perhaps because the NBA spoke sternly to ESPN, or perhaps because he has other duties, Shams doesn’t leak tonight, other scoopers quickly taking his place. After the initial fanfare—during which Adam Silver, the league’s bald and longilineal commissioner, is resoundingly booed, more out of custom or habit than true dislike—and in the lead-up to the first pick, I feel my first phone-buzz of the night: The Washington Wizards are selecting AJ Dybantsa. Throughout the night this process would be repeated, as Bleacher Report, a Twitter alert, or even a push notification from my fantasy basketball app would inform me who the team currently drafting was selecting minutes before it was officially announced in arena.
This desire to stay informed is often presented as indicative of our modern predicament. In response, one could strike an elegiac or lyrical posture about la condition moderne; things are always happening elsewhere, we feel that things are displaced by the riotous fragmentation of experience, courtesy of information technology; one could even get hysterically Heideggerian about it and babble about the age of technicity or begin conspiratorially clue-hunting. But the fundamental truth is that no amount of in-stadium entertainment—talking heads and draft trivia contests, T-shirt cannons and the jumbotron Gemini Cam that picks out a lucky audience member and digitally reconstitutes them as an animal or athlete—can make up for the fact that we are all just sitting around, looking down at the floor of the stadium at a group of kids and their families waiting, as we all are, as the clock counts down, to see if their names will be called.
To the right of me as we all wait are some Bulls fans, to the left some Wizards fans. People show up when their teams get good picks. I didn’t know that the Utah Jazz had undone so many until this year’s draft. Downstairs, at one of the pop-up shops, Karl Malone jerseys were being sold. Behind me sit a row of middle-school-aged Philadelphia 76ers fans. They’re having the most fun of anyone here—anyone here not being drafted at least—because they aren’t here to watch their team pick high and then leave; they’re here, it seems, out of pure love of basketball, having each come prepared with a personal draft board—a “Big Board,” in the parlance of the draft—and as each pick is made they cheer or groan. I can’t deduce their scoring system, but it’s clear that they’ve done extensive research and collectively have some favorite prospects. They rank Darius Acuff Jr. high, the loudest and most forceful of the general applause after he is selected seventh by the Sacramento Kings coming from the row behind me. When the Dallas Mavericks select Morez Johnson Jr. at ninth, there is at first surprise and then bemused disappointment, few having had Johnson Jr. going so high. But the confusion is most pronounced behind me. As the Mavericks came on the board for the pick, I heard murmurs of “Yaxel Lendeborg . . .” The Bucks are on the board next, and the murmurs elevate in volume, the name almost becoming a confrontational question, a demand: “Yaxel Lendeborg?” Confusion shades into outrage as Lendeborg falls another spot. Finally, when Lendeborg is selected at eleven by the Golden State Warriors, the response from our mock drafters is immediate and effusive: yelps of joy, a standing ovation even, the sort of demonstrative ebullience typically reserved for fans of championship teams and Cannes audiences.
After the first twelve players had been drafted, there was an ambient restlessness. Most of the players waiting to be selected were less famous. Watching the few players with high draft expectations fall pick by pick, their postures conveying growing anxiety while the festivities at their table slowly cease, is not the merriest way to pass one’s time. Moreover, most fans have come to see their teams pick high, and now that they have, everyone filters out, group by group, to the concourse, where the mood is carnivalesque.
On the concourse during the draft, everyone mixes together and the orientation of contemporary stadiums toward luxury experience breaks down a bit—a few years ago, Kylian Mbappe could even be spotted milling about, largely unrecognized by the fans more excited by spotting Ochai Agbaji. Tonight fans walk aimlessly back and forth; some younger kids question a recognizable member of the media, who patiently explains to them why a certain favorite college player has yet to be picked. Families and friends, having celebrated the drafting of a friend or relative on the floor of the Barclays Center, continue their celebration in front of the Kosher Grill, taking photos with the faux-gold draft basketball with the draftee’s name on it, as they slowly move toward the exit and whatever afterparty awaits. Richard Jefferson quickly walks through the throng, as a few younger children jog after him to shake his hand—he is harried but obliging. It’s a bit eerie skulking around, looking for future or former NBA players just for the reward of having seen them, but also anarchic, wild, the Barclays Center concourse for once governed by the logic of the crowd itself rather than the stadium authorities. When was the last time you were at a major event, in a stadium or other well-regulated public space, and didn’t feel marshalled, organized against your will, directed by outside authorities to your proper place, where you could just walk up to the VIP entrance and linger, perhaps spot a recently drafted Paolo Banchero stroll around in his heavily bediamonded purple draft suit, greeting friends and acquaintances?
In the throng, a lucky fan gets a last photo with the Rookie of the Year trophy before it’s packed up. I see a man in a Knicks hat excitedly talking to a preteen Nets fan about healing the Nets–Knicks divide, about bringing together the city because, after all, we are all New Yorkers. My amusement at this spontaneous peace conference curdles when I see the man’s friend holding his phone, filming with the flash on. The on-camera talent—evidently a Jalen Brunson look-alike, perhaps an attendee of the Polymarket-sponsored contest in Washington Square Park in June—starts aimlessly roaming, looking for further content-production opportunities. His friend follows him, still filming, a Kalshi tote bag slung over his shoulder. Everyone leaves expectant—maybe now the losing ends. This year the Wizards, the Jazz, the Nets, the Bulls, won’t suck (or will at least suck less), won’t lose intentionally, might actually win. Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.
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