Which team holds the most future NBA Draft picks?

The NBA Draft is a critical component to team building in the league. The draft order awarding the highest draft picks to the worst-performing teams can provide renewed hope for even the most dire situations, like when the Cleveland Cavaliers selected LeBron James at No. 1 in 2003 after a 17-win season and five straight years in the lottery.

Alternatively, with draft picks able to be traded, teams benefit from shrewd, forward-thinking (and at times lucky) moves when they can use other teams’ draft picks to select a franchise-altering talent. Many forget that Magic Johnson, taken No. 1 overall in 1979 by the Los Angeles Lakers, was not taken with the Lakers’ own draft pick. It was actually a draft pick acquired three years prior from the New Orleans Jazz that yielded arguably the greatest point guard in NBA history.

Draft picks can also be used as an invaluable currency in acquiring veteran stars to get contending teams over the hump. In recent history, we’ve seen monstrous pick platters swapped for superstars like Anthony Davis and Kevin Durant, while more modest amounts of draft equity have resulted in acquisitions of championship-influencing players like Jrue Holiday (2021 and 2024), Rasheed Wallace (2004) and Ray Allen (2008).

With the rapidly rising collective intelligence of league personnel, combined with the value draft picks provide among so many different avenues, it is more important than ever for NBA front offices to find the right balance of when to keep picks, when to trade them and who to use them on.

With the furious pace at which NBA transactions go down throughout each year, draft pick rights are all over the place. Per the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, teams may trade picks up to seven years in the future but no further. With that in mind, future draft rights can currently be defined for each year until the 2031 draft.

Teams can also trade conditional draft picks where the picks are only surrendered if they fall in certain ranges of the draft, making it an even more convoluted exercise to keep it all straight. This also means that we cannot define how many picks each team will have in future drafts with absolute certainty. Sometimes conditional protections on a traded pick will change the year in which a pick conveys and other times it may end up resulting in no first-round pick being surrendered at all. RealGM's Future Draft Rights page is a great resource for where the scenarios are laid out.

To account for these machinations, we’re going to apply some tediously developed projections of how all these conditional rights will turn out. This way, we can try to work with some semblance of order within all this chaos. It also obviously means that they could be incorrect but we’re dealing with some level of uncertainty here no matter the approach. Here's a breakdown of how that looks:

Projected future first-round picks for each team through 2031

Conventional team building approaches say that NBA teams will cycle through periods where they are competing, prioritizing the present for as many wins as possible and periods where they are rebuilding, prioritizing future flexibility and the draft. With this approach, being devoid of many draft assets would ideally mean your team is competing in the playoffs, while a team that isn’t collecting wins on the court would hopefully have some extra picks, or at least their own.

This list generally lines up with that approach. The Suns, Cavs, Bucks, Wolves and Knicks are at the bottom of the list but fancy themselves title contenders. Some of those expectations are more realistic than others, but the broad mindset still jives. The Bucks, in particular, might be on some of the shakiest ground, as their supporting cast around Giannis Antetokounmpo is aging considerably. With an elder cast of characters and little draft equity in the future, things could take a turn for the worse without some creative roster building. Although Antetokounmpo has largely played the role of good soldier throughout his career in Milwaukee, there is a reason other teams continue to have their eyes on him as a star who might end up wanting out.

At the top of the list, we have three teams in the Nets, Jazz and Spurs who fall quite easily into the “rebuilding” bucket. These teams are expected to be near the bottom of the standings and will have many bites at the apple in the draft with flexibility as trade assets too. The one who breaks the mold is the Thunder, who are coming off a 57-win season and look even more dangerous coming into 2024-25. Combining a young, elite roster with more draft equity than 27 other teams in the league is an embarrassment of riches unseen in the league’s history.

As an additional point of clarity, though all teams currently project to have at least three first-round picks over the next seven drafts, that does not mean that all of these picks are available for trade. The Phoenix Suns, for example, look like they'll have four picks over this span, but other than continuing to "horcrux" (justice for Lowe!) their outstanding obligations even further, the only pick available for them to trade outright is in 2031. Similarly, the Lakers are constantly in headlines about who they'll trade their picks for, but all five of these listed picks are not necessarily available for trade. Credit for these limitations can be given to the Stepien Rule, which is in place to save teams from dooming themselves in perpetuity.

If you’re curious about a year-by-year breakdown, here’s a snapshot of the teams projected to have the most draft picks by year over this span.

2025: Brooklyn Nets (4), Oklahoma City Thunder (3), Utah Jazz (3)

2026: Oklahoma City Thunder (2), Philadelphia 76ers (2), Toronto Raptors (2)

2027: Utah Jazz (4), Brooklyn Nets (3), Charlotte Hornets (2), Houston Rockets (2), Oklahoma City Thunder (2), San Antonio Spurs (2)

2028: Charlotte Hornets (2), Chicago Bulls (2), Philadelphia 76ers (2)

2029: Utah Jazz (3), Brooklyn Nets (3), Houston Rockets (2), Portland Trail Blazers (2), Washington Wizards (2)

2030: All teams projected to have one pick.

2031: Brooklyn Nets (2), San Antonio Spurs (2)

As mentioned, even if there were no new trades, protections and how teams finish each season will inevitably result in a few changes to this list as time goes on. This offers a reasonably realistic look at what teams are working with from a practical standpoint. We've also broken down the maximum possible picks for teams in the 2025 NBA Draft, if you're looking for a different perspective on next summer's race to Capture the Flagg.