C.J. Holmes: Nets enter NBA draft lottery with No. 1 pick in play, franchise history on their shoulders

(Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS)

NEW YORK — The biggest summer in recent Nets memory starts with ping-pong ball aerodynamics.

That’s the charm and cruelty of the NBA draft lottery. A season’s worth of losses, scouting, patience and organizational restraint gets handed over to bouncing balls in a machine. On Sunday afternoon in Chicago, the Nets will learn whether all of that leads them toward the kind of break that can change a franchise.

The 2026 NBA draft lottery will be held Sunday at 3 p.m. ET, with ABC revealing the results live. Brooklyn enters with the NBA’s third-worst record and the same top odds as the teams ahead of it: a 14% chance at the No. 1 overall pick and a 52.11% chance of landing in the top four.

The hopeful number is 14%. The nerve-wracking one is 26.02%. That’s Brooklyn’s chance of landing the No. 6 pick, its most likely individual outcome. The Nets also have a 13.41% chance at No. 2, a 12.74% chance at No. 3, an 11.96% chance at No. 4, a 14.82% chance at No. 5 and a 7.05% chance at No. 7.

So, Sunday isn’t just about whether the Nets can land the No. 1 pick. It’s about whether this rebuild gets a potential face, a top-tier building block or another complicated turn.

A jump to No. 1 would put Brooklyn in position to draft a player who could become the centerpiece of the next era. A top-four pick would still leave the Nets in range of the highest-end prospects in a class that will feature names such as AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, Cameron Boozer and Caleb Wilson. A fall to No. 6 or No. 7 wouldn’t ruin anything, but it would demand more from the scouting department, more from the development staff and more patience from a fan base that has already been asked for plenty.

The Nets have pieces. They have young players. They have future picks. They have flexibility. What they still need is the player who makes the rest of the plan easier to see.

Brooklyn has had lottery nights go both ways, though the painful ones tend to stick longer. The Nets won the lottery in 1990 after finishing with the NBA’s worst record and selected Derrick Coleman. They jumped to No. 1 again in 2000 after finishing with the seventh-worst record and selected , the last player the franchise took first overall.