Statistically speaking, there are few decisions you could make that are worse than buying a lottery ticket. But when the Powerball is nearing a half-billion dollars (as it is this week), people can be forgiven for saying, “Screw the math, the reward is massive enough to justify taking a shot.”
And statistically speaking, the odds of your last-round fantasy basketball draft picks remaining on your roster through the end of the season are higher than the odds of winning the Powerball. But, I regret to inform you, dear reader, that the math, in this case, makes minimal functional difference; you are not winning the Powerball, and you are going to drop at least two of your last three picks before the All-Star break. That’s the unfortunate reality.
Let that reality free you to chase the fantasy lottery.
Since the hit rate on late-round picks is so low, it often makes sense to forget about players’ floors and focus instead on their upsides. In a typical 14-round draft, I like to load up on undervalued safe plays (aka old vets) in Rounds 10 and 11 before abandoning caution entirely to chase ceilings in Rounds 12-14.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of my favorite late-round lottery picks in fantasy basketball drafts this season.
Within each section, players are listed in order of how I’d prioritize drafting them.
The market is missing something
Cameron Johnson, Brooklyn Nets
Stop me if this sounds familiar: the fantasy market gets excited about the ball-hoggy, shoot-first young guard on a tanking team, and some even consider the guard a dark horse candidate for the league’s scoring title. Meanwhile, a more established 28-year-old veteran forward stepping into a larger role gets mostly ignored and has an ADP basically double that of his younger counterpart.
The parallel between 2023-24’s Jordan Poole/Kyle Kuzma and 2024-25’s Cam Thomas/Cameron Johnson isn’t perfect, but it’s helpful to illustrate our collective overconfidence about the roles of good players on bad teams (and all four players involved are exactly that — good, not great; not bad, good.).
Johnson is easily the Nets’ best floor-spacer, which should help keep his minutes elevated. Every set of projections I’ve seen (including RotoWire’s and Yahoo’s) have him around 28 minutes per game, and I think that’s simply too low. His primary fantasy value is as a do-no-harm 3-point specialist, but I think the market is overlooking the possibility that he takes on meaningfully more offensive responsibilities following the departure of Mikal Bridges.
Good players who will (hopefully) force their way into more minutes
Ausar Thompson, Detroit Pistons
Thompson is really good. He hasn’t made a free throw since third grade, and the Pistons are deeper than you might have realized. But Thompson is really good. Detroit finally acquired some shooters, and it would be scientifically impossible for their coaching situation to have gotten worse. Hopefully, that means Thompson will participate in some thoughtfully constructed rotations that make basketball sense and allow him and other talented young Pistons to develop.
If you (reasonably) paid less attention to Detroit basketball than I did last year, you’d understand how radical a change I just described. He averaged 1.1 steals and 0.9 blocks in just 25.1 minutes as a 20-year-old rookie on the worst-managed* NBA team in recent memory. He should help in at least four categories (steals, blocks, FG%, rebounds) right away, and I think he will steadily earn more minutes and improve as a player.
*Excluding the Jim Boylen Bulls, who were the kind of once-in-a-lifetime dysfunction I’ll tell my grandkids about.
[Fantasy Hoops Draft Kit: One-stop shop for rankings, strategy and more]
Keyonte George, Utah Jazz
George is an excellent passer who gets to kick off the season as the full-time starting point guard. Whenever a non-lottery pick rookie earns a starting job over a healthy incumbent, we should take notice, and that’s exactly what the 20-year-old George did last February. Though he averaged “just” 5.2 assists per game (a solid haul for someone at his ADP) as a starter, he flashed the ability to rack up far more assists than that for several games at a time before the coaches asked him to shoot more.
If George continues to improve, or if the coaching staff asks him to go re-emphasize ball distribution, he could shoot up the fantasy ranks.
Tari Eason & Reed Sheppard, Houston Rockets
On shallower real-life rosters, Eason and Sheppard would be popular breakout picks. Both appear set for long NBA careers. Eason has a particularly fantasy-friendly skill set, though his path to minutes is more challenging than Sheppard’s.
If either one were guaranteed 27 minutes per night, they’d easily be top-120 picks. Instead, we’re taking late-round fliers on them in deeper leagues, hoping that the combination of injuries, trades, and good-ol’-fashioned-earning-more-minutes gets them enough court time for their abilities to impact the box scores.
Staying healthy is technically possible
Jonathan Isaac, Orlando Magic
For the first time since before the COVID-19 shutdowns, Isaac had a mostly healthy season in 2023-24. After missing two entire seasons, and then playing just 11 games in a third, Isaac finally returned to life as a regular NBA rotation player.
OK. He played under a severe minutes restriction with numerous scheduled days off. He missed five games with a normal ankle injury and 10 with a normal hamstring injury, and two games with a knee strain. So I’m being a bit liberal with “mostly healthy.” But he played 58 games! Over his last nine (including the playoffs), he averaged 7-6-1 with 2.2 stocks and 1.3 threes in just 22.3 minutes. Even in limited minutes, he can function as a defensive specialist. And if he somehow stays healthy and can get closer to 25 minutes per game, he could get into the top 100 or higher.
Robert Williams, Portland Trail Blazers
Williams is only an option in deeper leagues, both because of his crowded depth chart and his somehow- -worse-than-Jonathan-Isaac’s injury history. But when Williams played, he was a monster. He finished as a top-100 player (per game) during seasons when he averaged just 19 and 24 minutes.
Williams a defensive dynamo with excellent field goal efficiency and minimal free throw attempts. The only problem, and it’s a big problem, is he might not play often enough for any of that to matter.
30 (or under) is too young to be washed, right?
Andrew Wiggins, Golden State Warriors
Wiggins has packed a lot of a career into just 29 years on this planet. From one of the most hyped rookies of his decade to glorified salary filler in what was then thought of as “The D’Angelo Russell Trade,” to the second-best player on a championship run that included three Hall of Famers. Then his 2023-24 was an unmitigated disaster. It’s possible that — after 10 seasons and more than 25,000 minutes — a player whose “drive” was always in question has entered the denouement of his career.
Alternatively, Wiggins missed many games for then-undisclosed “personal reasons” over the last 18 months, before his father died in September at age 64. Perhaps playing under the cloud of his father’s failing health had an impact.
Wiggins may return to the quality output he was contributing in 2021-22 and early 2022-23 (or better, since modern NBA primes are extending past age 29). Back then, he was averaging roughly 17-5-2 with more than two 3 and nearly two stocks per game. He’s got a lot more competition for minutes now, but he’s going so late in drafts as to be worth the risk.
Jerami Grant, Portland Trail Blazers
If you are in a roto league, Grant is undervalued. His ADP makes more sense in head-to-head leagues, but he’s a worthwhile risk. Grant has missed the fantasy playoffs in each of the last four years due to a tragic case of Seasonal Tankitis. Unfortunately, doctors do expect the condition to persist throughout the duration of his current contract. However, despite the early starts to his summer vacations, he’s averaged basically 20-4-3 with two-ish 3s and 1.5-ish stocks in all four seasons.
That’s undeniably good fantasy production.
In a roto league, where the timing of production doesn’t matter, he should be going at least two rounds earlier. In head-to-head leagues, he’s an excellent complement for managers who are taking the risk on currently injured guys like Kristaps Porziņģis, Devin Vassell, Trey Murphy or fellow Trail Blazer Shaedon Sharpe. Grant’s early season strength should help you survive until those players are healthy enough to reach their potential. And perhaps most importantly, Grant’s current ADP basically ignores the possibility that either A) he gets traded to a decent team, or B) he doesn’t get shut down in March.
Ben Simmons — do you even know what team he’s on without checking anymore?
Turns out he’s still on the Nets. His productive career is probably over. I don’t actually recommend drafting him. But perhaps your league is really deep, and everyone else in this article is already gone? Also, how can I have this section without mentioning the king of the offseason workout 3-pointer social media clip?
Rookies
Rookies are a mystery box. We are bad at predicting who will hit and who won’t. This class is, seemingly justifiably, viewed as worse than usual. But it’s still likely that one or two will emerge as impact fantasy options. There’s so much unknown that I’m not going to break down each individual player, but here are my favorite late-round rookie lottery picks. Because, sometimes, the mystery box might contain a boat.
