2026 Draft Tourney winner: Kingston Flemings; plus other Draft thoughts

thanks to all the voters

Here are all the Draft Tournaments and Live Draft Day threads since 2020. The 2026 page describes how the field was chosen, analyzes the relevance of BPM and other gory details.

The NBA Draft 1st round is Tue Jun 23, 5pm PT. 2nd round is Wed Jun 24, 5pm PT

Table of Contents

• The 2026 Draft Tourney Winner is Kingston Flemings

• Reading the tea leaves

• My Emotional Draft Big Board

  • Ecstasy, but then we wake up and it was all a dream

  • Great value for #11 but I’m worried

  • Ecstatic

  • Happy

  • Cautiously happy

  • Cautiously open minded

  • Meh

  • What are we doing here?

• Possible trade downs

• The field for a second round Draft Tourney

The 2026 Draft Tourney Winner is Kingston Flemings

Here are the finalists with their share of the vote.

• Mikel Brown Jr 16%

• Cameron Carr 8%

• Morez Johnson Jr 4%

• Yaxel Lendeborg 30%

• Kingston Flemings 42% WINNER

It was a very close vote in the poll, but the comments had Kingston Flemings. Flemings is also my choice. While the others are all promising prospects, Yaxel is old; Morez is raw; Carr is not young and statistically doesn’t pop; Brown has injury questions and even though CHAW loves him, his BPM is very low. That leaves Flemings, an excellent two way player whose only negative might be that his wingspan is 6-3.5 and his height is 6-2.5 for only +1 wingspan.

The only thing really holding back Flemings from a bigger margin in the DNHQ vote is just skepticism that he will be available at number eleven. After all, he is mock drafted to be taken around number seven.

But here is some Copium for you:

• belilaugh: #FLEMINGS. I said I wouldn’t vote for him in the future but now I am kinda wondering, have we heard his name attached to any of the top 10 teams as a player they are interested in? Feel like we hear more about Brown, Acuff, Wagler, Burries, Mara, even Ament. Maybe that is because a team like Dallas assumes Flemings won’t be there, but if all those guys I named go top 10, Flemings is there at 11. I don’t think it is likely to happen at all but just given the lack of predraft “intel” on teams that are hot on Flemings, I will break my plan from a few days ago and pick him.

  I think Flemings would be my best case scenario for the pick overall. Realistically with him out of the picture, I’d say “my guys” for this draft are Okorie, Graves, and Swain so naturally I’m rooting for a trade down. But there are other guys I’d be fine with too.

Reading the tea leaves

These Tourney players have been publicly announced as working out for the Warriors.

• Brayden Burries

• Yaxel Lendeborg

• Cameron Carr

• Morez Johnson Jr.

• Hannes Steinbach

• Bennett Stirtz

I note with some bitterness that Mike Dunleavy Jr. has made a habit of concealing the workouts with their favorite players in the last couple of years. For instance, both Quinten Post’s and Will Richard’s workouts were not announced.

My Emotional Draft Big Board

We’ve discussed this from an eye-test perspective with our scouting reports and an intense analytics perspective with Wyatt. After all that, here is my purely emotional reaction to imagining drafting the player at #11.

Ecstasy, but then we wake up and it was all a dream

• Cameron Boozer

• Darryn Peterson

• AJ Dybantsa

• Caleb Wilson

Great value for #11 but I’m worried

• Keaton Wagler

• Darius Acuff Jr.

Ecstatic

• Kingston Flemings

Happy

• Brayden Burries

• Ebuka Okorie

Cautiously happy

• Mikel Brown Jr.

• Labaron Philon

Cautiously open minded

• Yaxel Lendeborg

• Allen Graves

• Cameron Carr

• Nate Ament

• Morez Johnson Jr.

• Aday Mara

• Christian Anderson

• Bennett Stirtz

Meh

• Dailyn Swain

• Hannes Steinbach

What are we doing here?

• Karim López

• Jayden Quaintance

• Chris Cenac Jr.

Possible trade downs

There are a couple of straightforward trade-down possibilities. The Warriors have #11. The Charlotte Hornets have picks 14 and 18, and the Oklahoma City Thunder have picks 12 and 17.

However, by conventional wisdom calculations, either of those 2-for-1 trades would be a significant overpay for #11. It could only happen if a prospect that one of the teams was in love with did fall to #11, OR if GSW threw in extra value, like a future pick or a player.

According to the values above, a fairer trade would be GSW #11 (23.9 VORP) for OKC #17 (17 VORP) and #37 (8.1 VORP). In theory, that could give GSW a shot at Ebuka Okorie and one of the best seniors who ran out of eligibility (same type as Quinten Post, Trayce Jackson-Davis, and Will Richard).

The field for a second round Draft Tourney

We didn’t have time to do a proper draft tourney for the Warriors’ number 54 second-round pick. Just so you can cram a little bit before the final exam on Wednesday, here is the field of prospects that I would have picked for the tourney.

The methodology is pretty simple:

• I took Tankathon.com mock draft players ranked number 40 through number 75 as these are the most likely to be available at #54 while also being a plausible draft pick and not someone to be signed as an undrafted free agent.

• I filtered for players ranked by either BPM or CHAWBPM as 54th or above in the entire nation. Note that this would make them better than the 54th pick, as the rankings would include all college players, not just the ones who declared for the draft.

  • If you look at last year’s tournament page, I discuss why we use BPM to select good prospects. In fact, Mike Dunleavy Jr has so far valued analytics much higher than Bob Myers. MDJ’s picks have been ranked in BPM (out of all 5,000+ college players who played 40% of possible minutes):

    • #1 Trayce Jackson-Davis (#3 CHAW)

    • #11 Brandin Podziemski (#15 CHAW)

    • #31 Quinten Post (#12 CHAW)

    • #35 Will Richard (#284 CHAW)

  • And the pattern holds even if you include undrafted free agents signed on draft night,

    • #39 Reese Beekman (#8 CHAW)

    • #70 LJ Cryer (#77 CHAW)

    • #79 Chance McMillian (#136 CHAW)

  • And notably the undrafted FAs even had worse BPM than the draft players.

• I filtered out players chosen by BPM that did not appear in the top 250 CHAWBPM prospects and also filtered out CHAWBPM selections that did not appear in the top 200 BPM players.

Here is the list of selected players:

Confirmed workouts with GSW

• Ugonna Onyenso, Virginia, C (#6 BPM, #76 CHAW)

• Maliq Brown, Duke, Wing F (#7 BPM, #188 CHAW)

• Dillon Mitchell, St. John’s, PF/C (#29 BPM, #217 CHAW)

• Tamin Lipsey, Iowa State, Scoring PG (#34 BPM, #134 CHAW)

• Emanuel Sharp, Houston, Combo G (#58 BPM, #50 CHAW)

• Ja’Kobi Gillespie, Tennessee, Pure PG (#61 BPM, #37 CHAW)

• Nate Bittle, Oregon, PF/C (#83 BPM, #30 CHAW)

• Tucker DeVries, Indiana, Wing G (#126 BPM, #51 CHAW)

• Quadir Copeland, NC State, Pure PG (#178 BPM, #49 CHAW)
  

No confirmed workouts with GSW

• Bruce Thornton, Ohio State, Combo G (#18 BPM, #106 CHAW)

• Rafael Castro, George Washington, C (#38 BPM, #98 CHAW)

• Izaiyah Nelson, South Florida, C (#44 BPM, #97 CHAW)

• Nick Boyd, Wisconsin, Scoring PG (#93 BPM, #39 CHAW)

If you are bored, you can dig into their statistics and video highlights yourself.

Following the most cynical view of MDJ, since he’s picked a player whose workouts were concealed the last two drafts, it would be just like him to pick one of the “no confirmed workouts” list. My eye is on Thornton, a sweet shooting, downhill point guard, whose main issue is being a little short and a lot old.