NBA Draft: Every team’s least popular pick ever

New Orleans Pelicans – Hilton Armstrong/Cedric Simmons (2006)

Coming into the 2006 NBA Draft, the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets had a great look at what they could potentially do in the draft. Not only had they earned the No. 12 overall pick via the lottery, but they also owned the No. 15 overall pick—the first outside of the lottery—by way of a trade with the Bucks. With two picks in the top half of the first round, you had to figure that at least one of them wuld hit and help New Orleans take a huge step forward.

Unfortunately, that’s not at all what happened. Instead, they took Hilton Armstrong out of UConn with the No. 12 pick and then took Cedric Simmons out of North Carolina State with the No. 15 pick. If you need an indication of how both of those picks worked out just in general, neither of those two players are in the league anymore.

Armstrong spent 3.5 years with the Hornets with little production or signs of promise coming from those seasons. Simmons was even worse as he lasted just 43 games before being gone and never doing much else in the league. They whiffed in a big way and you can really just call the whole 2006 draft unpopular for New Orleans.

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