With the basketball part of the 2025-26 season now concluded, with the New York Knicks ending a 53-year championship drought, focus will now turn to the 2026 NBA Draft on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Let’s dive into three draft considerations that center on some of the projected high-lottery players and can shape the direction of the draft — and franchise futures.
High floor or high ceiling?
AJ Dybantsa vs. Darryn Peterson is a classic NBA discussion, yet again, but it’s one worth having given how absolutely crucial it is.
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A fully healthy and functional Peterson has more upside in terms of the most important Tier 1 skill in the NBA: shot creation.
Peterson can create his own offense like it’s nobody’s business, even if he didn’t get to fully show it off at Kansas due to an odd role and even odder physical issues, which plagued him most of the year.
Peterson is the type of player you can envision consistently creating his own offense during the late stages of an NBA Finals game, which means the ceiling — if realized — is enormous.
Dybantsa, on the other hand, offers a level of two-way consistency that’s crucial to helping a team to make a Finals run to begin with. He’s got so many tools to apply during the course of a game that coaches will eventually find it difficult to take him off the floor.
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He’s a switchable wing who, at 6-10 in shoes, can make passes on the fly, rebound and push the ball, make scoring plays either on or off the ball, and will constantly find himself involved in plays.
That’s the description of a winning player, but what we don’t yet know is whether he can elevate that game to reach true superstar territory.
I don’t envy Washington’s position here. I do envy Utah’s, which should simply go with the one remaining and not look back.
SB Nation’s Ricky O’Donnell recently compared Boozer to Larry Bird on a recent episode of his podcast, Cash Considerations.
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While I initially dismissed that idea, I’ve come around on the thought process of it.
I still don’t agree with the comparison, but O’Donnell raises the point of Boozer as a half-court creator who understands how to use his smarts to generate offense, and that is a sound conclusion.
I’m overall still skeptical about Boozer, who measured 6-8.25 without shoes and seems entirely locked into one position: power forward. He doesn’t appear to be particularly fluid in terms of positions, and he won’t offer much in terms of rim protection.
In other words: He’ll have to be essentially flawless at the four to become a genuine superstar. To his credit, he’s won an absolute ton of games everywhere he’s been, and his IQ is substantial, which we’ve seen translate well into the NBA.
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So, what is Boozer? Is he a featured superstar, or a secondary All-Star you pair with a Tier 1 player? I personally lean into the second camp. That’s not a bad result whatsoever, and it’d be a wonderful get in the 3-4 range. But take him higher, and it becomes a bit more questionable.
The small-guard conundrum
It’s historically been much easier, and cheaper, to acquire small guards via trade and free agency than to select them highly in the draft.
Will this trend continue, or will recently crowned NBA Finals MVP Jalen Brunson inspire teams to go for one in the high lottery anyway?
I’m thinking specifically of Darius Acuff Jr. out of Arkansas.
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He measured 6-foot-2 without shoes at the combine, but his relentless offensive game (23.5 points and 6.4 assists as a freshman) could be enough to at least make teams consider him fairly high up.
Of course, prospective teams could decide to look at the market and instead prioritize size, which is usually more expensive.
Could teams in the top 5-7 instead look at Michigan’s Aday Mara (7-3 without shoes) and decide his size is just too difficult to obtain otherwise?
The answer likely is going to be team-dependent, but it’s nevertheless a discussion front offices will have behind closed doors.
