2026 NBA Draft Takeaways: Who Went Too High, Too Low and Other Observations

Here are my quick takes from Tuesday night’s first round at Barclays Center:

Picked too high

1. Keaton Wagler (No. 5 to the Clippers). Keep in mind that last year, my choice for this was Kon Knueppel, who was a very close second for Rookie of the Year. (Unlike many draft pundits, I own my bad takes.) But given what I had been hearing from NBA scouts about Wagler, I was a little surprised to see him as the first guard selected.

Wagler had an incredible year at Illinois, especially considering he was not ranked in the top 200 of his high school class. The only thing that scares me about him is his lack of burst. He had zero dunks this season. He is not the type of player to blow by defenders or finish against NBA defenders in transition. He’ll have to succeed the way he did at Illinois, with hesitation moves, guile and exceptional skill. He’ll be a good NBA player for sure, but my prediction is that when we look back at this draft down the road, we’ll see a few players selected lower who turned out to be better.

2. Ebuka Okorie (No. 17 by the Thunder, traded to the Pistons). Okurie set an ACC record for scoring average by a freshman and was seventh in the nation, but it’s not easy to find successful 6-foot-1 two guards in the NBA. He is going to transition to the point in order to have a successful pro career. Maybe that will happen, but that’s not an easy adjustment to make.

3. Zuby Ejiofor (No. 23 to the Hawks). Most people projected Ejiofor to be a second-round pick, so this was a mild surprise. Ejiofor was the best player in the Big East and an anchor for St. Johns’s Sweet Sixteen team. But at 6-foot-9, he is an undersized center who shot just 30.5 percent from three-point range. He is a senior, so you wonder how much room he has to improve. Ejiofor brings a lot of intangibles to the table, but he will have to round out his offensive game considerably if he’s going to stick in the NBA.

Picked too low

1. Nate Ament (No. 13 to Miami, traded to Milwaukee). This guy has all the physical tools to be an NBA star. He showed at times this season that he could be a high-level scorer. But there were other times when he seemed real young, overmatched physically and disappearing offensively for long stretches. If is able to mature and reach his ceiling, he is as gifted as any player in this draft.

2. Cameron Carr (No. 24 to New York and traded to the Lakers). Carr was arguably the best athlete in the draft. He was a high flying scorer at Baylor and was the breakout star of the predraft combine in Chicago. Some of the scouts I talked to wondered about his maturity, especially in might of his messy exit from Tennessee midway through his freshman season. Has he put those questions behind him? Is he the type to fight through adversity and grind to get better? If the answers to those are yes, the Lakers got themselves a major steal.

3. Chris Cenac Jr. (No. 27 to Boston). We always hear about how NBA teams like young players with upside, so I was surprised to see Cenac drop this low. Cenac is 6-foot-11 240 pounds and has the frame to grow into a sturdy NBA center. He is an elite rebounder who grabbed 7.9 boards per game in just 24.8 minutes. He already showed he has long-range potential (33.3 percent from three on 2.4 attempts per game), and most important he comes from a program whose culture is steeped in toughness and work ethic. He is going to get a lot better, you watch.

Biggest story:

Quite literally, it was the Michigan three-headed frontcourt monster all going in the lottery: Morez Johnson at No. 9 to Dallas, Yaxel Lendeborg at No. 11 to Golden State, and Aday Mara at No. 12 to Oklahoma City. This remarkable achievement played out against the backdrop of Monday’s stunning news that their former coach, Dusty May, is leaving Ann Arbor to coach the Dallas Mavericks. It was fitting that the team’s first draft choice in the Dusty Era is a former Wolverine. That’s quite a big couple of days for that program.

The Thunder’s decision to select the 7-foot-3 Mara when they already have the 7-foot-1 Chet Holmgren probably has something to do with their need to overcome the 7-foot-5 Victor Wembenyama. That, of course, is a challenge for every team in the league. It will be interesting to see how well those two play together. Mara does not have nearly the shooting range that Holmgren had, even when Holmgren was a freshman at Gonzaga, but he does have a healthy mid-range game and is able to defend in space. But the NBA does not lend itself to lane clogging, so it will interesting to watch those guys figure out how to coexist.

Names to watch for the second round: 

Meleek Thomas, 6-foot-5 freshman guard, Arkansas. I thought Thomas had a great chance to go in the first round. It won’t be long before he hears his name called Wednesday night. Thomas is a big, dynamic athlete with a real knack for scoring. He shot 41.6 percent from three-point range as a freshman. His numbers were all the more impressive given that he played alongside a high usage point guard in Darius Acuff Jr. I expect him to be among the first picks of the second round, and whoever drafts him will rightly believe they got a steal.

Braden Smith, 6-foot-1 senior point guard, Purdue. Smith will be drawing a ton of comparisons to Jalen Brunson, who was a National Player of the Year in college but fell to the second round in 2018 due to doubts about his size. Smith left Purdue as college basketball’s all-time assists leader, and he was much better on the defensive end than most people give him credit for. He does not fit the mold of what a successful NBA point guard generally looks like, so he has an uphill climb ahead.

AJ TO DC

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