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On Monday night, the NBA held its annual draft lottery, and to everyone's surprise, it was the Dallas Mavericks, a team that had a 1.8 percent chance at winning the first overall pick, that ended up being the night's biggest winner.
In fact, three teams jumped from less advantageous places all the way to the top three, with the San Antonio Spurs and Philadelphia 76ers owning the picks right after the Mavericks, respectively. This then prompted a cold response from Phoenix Suns star Kevin Durant.
Durant, posting on his official account on X, formerly Twitter, dropped a truth bomb regarding today's NBA Draft landscape and how unforgiving it can be for the teams in the bottom of the league's totem pole.
Teams such as the Charlotte Hornets, Utah Jazz, and Washington Wizards all finished with fewer than 20 wins this past season, and all they were rewarded with were the fourth, fifth, and sixth overall picks of the 2025 NBA Draft, respectively.
“Tanking must be really stressful on a organization,” Durant wrote.
Indeed, there are a lot of things far beyond a team's control whenever they decide to hit the reset button in hopes of finding a transformative young player through the draft. With the lottery odds being flattened in recent years, it's even more unlikely for the worst teams in the NBA to get the grand prize of the draft.
This is not to say that tanking doesn't work. The Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets were the top-two seeds in the Western Conference this past season, and they also spent a few years in the NBA's basement, allowing them to stockpile young players who have since blossomed into excellent players.
But there is plenty of luck involved whenever a team decides to tank, and the Suns star summed up just how crestfallen the front offices of the Hornets, Jazz, and Wizards must be at present.
Suns may have to tank really soon
The Suns may have no choice but to blow everything up and start from scratch really soon. Their “big three” of Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, and Bradley Beal has evidently run its course after missing out on the play-in tournament entirely this past season.
The problem, however, is that the Suns do not control their own first-round pick until 2032 at the earliest. This is dire and would prevent them from starting over, which means that no other team in the NBA may have as bleak of an outlook as they do. Of course, they can trade veteran players for draft picks to speed up the process.
