This year’s NBA Draft is pegged to be the deepest draft in a few years. While most drafts have only a handful of elite-level talent, this year seems to have a good spread of players who can be instant contributors for their teams. What’s even more interesting, though, is how young these players are.
The first five players selected in this year’s NBA draft were BYU’s AJ Dybantsa to the Wizards, Kansas’s Darryn Peterson to the Jazz, Duke’s Cameron Boozer to the Grizzlies, UNC’s Caleb Wilson to the Bulls, and Illinois’ Keaton Wagler to the Clippers. The fascinating thing about these five players is that all of them were freshmen. This marks the first time that five freshmen were selected in the first five picks of back-to-back drafts.
The top 5 picks of the NBA draft were all freshmen in back-to-back years for the first time in the modern draft era
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— ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) June 24, 2026
Last season, five freshmen also went in the Top 5 of the 2025 NBA Draft. These players are Duke’s Cooper Flagg and Kon Kneuppel, Rutgers’ Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey and Baylor’s VJ Edgecombe. All five players have become productive players in the league in their first year, with Harper and Edgecombe in particular becoming key pieces in their team’s playoff runs.
This year’s NBA draft class hopes to have a similar trajectory to the last class. While Dybantsa was the consensus first overall pick for most of the draft season, Boozer, Peterson, and Wilson also got some hype for the position. While the situations that they’re headed into are different, the hope is that they will be able to elevate their teams from the lottery to potentially contending for a title.
Other notable draftees in this year’s draft include Adey Mara, who went to the 2025 champions, the Oklahoma City Thunder; Mikel Brown Jr (drafted sixth by the Nets); Yaxel Lendenborg (taken by the Warriors); and Nate Ament, who was picked by the Bucks with the pick they acquired in the Giannis Antetokounmpo trade.
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