Wizards eye Dybantsa, Boozer, Peterson and Wilson at No 1 after winning NBA draft lottery

The league’s worst team this season are getting the No 1 pick in the NBA draft. The Washington Wizards won the draft lottery on Sunday and are poised to pick first overall for the first time since choosing John Wall in that spot in 2010. Wall was the Wizards’ on-stage representative for this year’s lottery.

Utah won the right to pick No 2, Memphis will pick No 3 and Chicago will pick No 4.

Washington had a 14% chance of winning No 1, tied with Brooklyn and Indiana for the best odds. The Wizards effectively had a 50-50 chance of getting either a top-four pick or the No 5 spot.

But three consecutive years of losing – the three worst seasons in the franchise’s 65-year history – finally paid off Sunday for the Wizards, who went 17-65 this season and allowed Miami’s Bam Adebayo to score 83 points for the league’s second-highest single-game total ever.

The Wizards swung deals to land Trae Young and Anthony Davis last season, and now they have a chance to add an immediate impact player with the No 1 pick.

The Los Angeles Clippers got the fifth pick – via a trade with the Pacers – followed by No 6 Brooklyn, No 7 Sacramento, No 8 Atlanta, No 9 Dallas, No 10 Milwaukee, No 11 Golden State, No 12 Oklahoma City, No 13 Miami and No 14 Charlotte.

The draft begins on 23 June in New York. There are four candidates considered front-runners to be the No 1 pick, all of them entering the draft after their freshman years of college. They are:

BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, who led the nation in scoring at 25.5 points per game in his lone college season.

Duke’s Cameron Boozer, the AP player of the year who averaged 22.5 points and 10.1 rebounds.

Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, who averaged 20.2 points in 24 games for the Jayhawks.

North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson, who averaged 19.8 points and 9.4 rebounds on 58% shooting.

All four of those players, and a few other likely first-round selections, were in the studio for the announcement of the lottery results Sunday at Chicago’s Navy Pier.

“Standing here is kind of crazy,” Dybantsa said. “One of these teams is going to be home.”

This was the eighth, and likely final, year of this version of an NBA draft lottery, with the worst teams having a 14% chance of winning.

A framework fell into place last month on changes meant to further discourage tanking, and the league’s Board of Governors is expected to ratify that plan in the next few weeks – with general managers meeting in Chicago on Tuesday to discuss them presumably for one last time.