The 2026 NBA Rookie Class: Dybantsa, Peterson, Boozer and the Rest

Published August 15, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

The 2026 NBA Draft ran June 23 and 24 at Barclays Center. Washington took AJ Dybantsa first, Utah took Darryn Peterson second, and Cameron Boozer went to Memphis. Seven trades were executed on draft night. By the end of summer league the consensus order had already started to move, and the loudest single performance belonged to a player nobody had at the top of a board.

The top of the draft

1. AJ Dybantsa, Washington Wizards. The wing everyone expected at the top, and Washington did not deviate. He played only two summer league games, which is normal management for a first overall pick, and scored his first professional basket against Peterson and Utah on a left-hand drive finished with his right in traffic. Two games is not a sample, and the Wizards were visibly satisfied with it anyway.

2. Darryn Peterson, Utah Jazz. The guard with the strongest case to go first, and the player most likely to make the order look wrong in three years. Utah has been accumulating this kind of asset for several drafts running.

3. Cameron Boozer, Memphis Grizzlies. Memphis, having just traded Ja Morant to Portland, took the most polished college player in the class. Boozer’s freshman season was characterised by more than one national outlet as among the best one-and-done seasons in recent college basketball, and the fit with a team in the first year of a rebuild is cleaner than it looks.

4. Caleb Wilson, Chicago Bulls. He scored 35 points in his summer league debut, the second-highest total in a Las Vegas debut since the event began in 2004. That is the single number from the whole summer worth remembering.

Summer league is not evidence, with one exception

The honest framing for everything above: summer league tells you almost nothing about who will be good. It is played by rosters that will not exist in October, at a pace nobody sustains, with officiating calibrated differently, and the history of summer league standouts who never established rotation careers is long enough to be its own article.

The exception is the extreme outlier. A 35-point debut is not a projection, but it is a demonstration that a specific skill, in Wilson’s case scoring volume against professional length, exists at a level the draft position did not price in. That is worth updating on. A rookie averaging 14 on efficient shooting for five games is not.

The other genuinely useful signal from July was the No. 7 pick leading all scorers at the California Classic at 23.5 points per game, which is a smaller event but a longer look.

The picks that came from other people’s trades

Two of the more interesting selections were made with capital acquired in the summer’s blockbusters.

Milwaukee took Nate Ament at 13, using the pick that came from Miami in the Giannis Antetokounmpo trade. The Bucks now hold three extra first-round picks and a swap from that deal, so Ament is the first of what will be several drafts’ worth of returns on a franchise player leaving.

Dallas took Morez Johnson out of Michigan at 9.

The broader pattern of the night was volume of movement rather than any single deal: seven trades executed during the draft, which is high, and consistent with a summer in which five All-Star-level players changed teams.

Where this class sits

The 2026 group was scouted for two years as one of the deepest in recent memory, which is a claim made about most classes and occasionally true. What is verifiable is narrower: three players (Dybantsa, Peterson, Boozer) were considered plausible first overall picks into the final weeks, which is unusual, and the fourth pick outscored all three in his professional debut.

The comparison being made most often is to the 2025 class headlined by Cooper Flagg. That comparison will be settled around 2029 and not before.

Related reading

• The 2026 NBA Draft
• The 2026 NBA Draft Lottery
• Every NBA number one pick
• Cooper Flagg
• Giannis Antetokounmpo traded to Miami

Sources

Draft results (Dybantsa first to Washington, Peterson second to Utah, Boozer to Memphis, Wilson fourth to Chicago, Johnson ninth to Dallas, Ament 13th to Milwaukee) and the seven draft-night trades from ESPN’s round-one coverage and Yahoo Sports’ live draft results. Dybantsa’s two summer league games and his first professional basket against Utah from ESPN’s summer league coverage. Wilson’s 35-point debut, described as the second-highest in a Las Vegas debut since 2004, from Bleacher Report and NBA.com. The California Classic scoring lead (23.5 points per game for the No. 7 pick) from NBA.com. Dybantsa’s college line from the reporting cited in our draft coverage.

Refresh trigger: update after the first month of the regular season, and again at the All-Star break when the Rookie of the Year field is clear.