Ranking all 68 traded future NBA first-round picks: Suns face surprising rival for dubious honor of No. 1

Sixty-eight future first-round draft picks have changed hands, and we've ranked all of them by their value

By Sam Quinn Sep 11, 2024 at 9:40 am ET• 50 min read

I rank every traded first-round pick in the NBA at some point during every offseason, and every offseason that list gets longer. When we started this tradition in 2022, there were 47 picks to rank. Fast forward to 2023 and the list grew to 56. Now that we've reached 2024, we're up to 68 total picks. Here's how those picks break down:

• 24 unprotected picks owed outright.
• 22 protected picks owed outright.
• 16 unprotected picks owed through swap rights.
• Five protected picks owed through swap rights.

If there was any fear that the new collective bargaining agreement was going to scare teams into holding onto their picks, well, we can brush that aside. Making the money work is harder than ever, but once teams figure that part out, they're going to keep packaging all of their picks for the unhappy veteran du jour. At any given time in the NBA, there are 210 theoretically available first-round picks. That figure counts every team's pick for the next seven years, which is the furthest out a team can trade them. For the first time since this exercise began, we've crossed the 30% owed threshold. Of those 210 total picks, 32.3% of them have been traded.

But as always, not all draft picks are created equal. Sometimes an owed first-round pick gets you Jayson Tatum. Sometimes it gets you Romeo Langford. Our goal today is to figure out which picks have the best chance at creating Tatums and which ones are likelier to get you a Langford. Here are the criteria we use to sort them out:

• Protections. This is the most obvious distinction between a potentially valuable pick and a lesser one. The unprotected pick is almost always going to be worth more.
• Point of origin. Is the pick coming from a good team or a bad team? More importantly, where do we expect the team in question to be when the pick is likeliest to convey? Is that team's roster young or old? Healthy or injury-prone? Do you trust that team's front office and ownership? A pick's upside is the single most important factor in its value. Virtually any team would rather have a small chance at a very high pick than a guaranteed pick in the 20's, and where swap rights are concerned, the value gap between each pick rises the higher pick gets. The difference between the No. 1 pick and the No. 2 pick is enormous. The difference between the No. 20 pick and the No. 21 pick is not.
• Year of conveyance. This is a bit more complicated to measure. All things being equal, most teams would prefer to have a great pick right now than a great pick five years from now. That's a job security issue as much as anything. General managers don't want picks they might not stick around long enough to use. But for the most part, picks that are coming up immediately are closer to known quantities. Picks in the future are a bit more nebulous. Therefore, if the pick is coming from a good team, it probably makes more sense to get the pick down the line, when that team might be older, might have dealt with financial issues or might have broken apart for unforeseeable reasons. Remember, draft picks are trade assets as much as they are isolated drafting tools, and when it comes to trade assets, perception matters. If you have a pick seven years out, that's seven years for the rest of the league to lose faith in the pick's original owner. The further out the pick, the more opportunity you'll have to profit off of the perception cycle. The timeline for each pick will be judged based on the team it is coming from.
• Is the pick owed outright or is it owed through a swap? Obviously teams would prefer to keep their own first-rounder, but if the pick is good enough, a swap can be well worth the price. In the case of swaps, the value of the incoming pick will be weighed more heavily, but the value of the outgoing pick will be factored in as well.

One quick distinction that I'm making for the sake of my own sanity: secondary swaps will notbe ranked. A secondary swap comes when a team offers swap rights in a year in which they already owe swap rights. The Suns, for example, owe swap rights on their 2026 pick to the Wizards... but have also given the Magic the right to swap picks with them wherever they land after that Washington swap... and then the Grizzlies have the right to swap with the Suns after that. We're not jumping down that rabbit hole. The 2026 Phoenix pick will be ranked on its own.