By KL Chouinard
The Hawks are going to land a high draft pick in the upcoming 2026 NBA Draft, and Sunday's NBA Lottery (3:00 PM ET) will let them know exactly how high that pick will be.
As a playoff team, the Hawks would not normally participate in the event, but last year the Hawks made a draft-night trade with the New Orleans Pelicans to acquire Asa Newell and a 2026 first-round draft pick (the most favorable of either New Orleans and Milwaukee) in exchange for Derik Queen.
As a result, the Hawks will have a 40.2 percent chance of garnering a top-four pick from a loaded draft class.
The lottery process determines which teams will pick in the first four spots on June 23; the remaining ten teams will be slotted into a draft order based upon the 2025-26 winning percentage of the teams who originally held those picks.
The most likely outcome for a single position, by a large margin, is that the Hawks end up with the 8th-overall pick: a 30.18 percent chance. The second-most probable outcome is that they land in the 7th spot. After those two, the four next-most likely results involve them leapfrogging into one of the top-four spots.
Below is the full list of likelihoods, in order from most probable to least:
· 8th pick – 30.18 percent
· 7th pick – 19.75 percent
· 4th pick – 10.30 percent
· 3rd pick – 10.14 percent
· 2nd pick – 9.97 percent
· 1st pick – 9.80 percent
· 9th pick – 9.19 percent
· 10th pick – 0.67 percent
· 11th pick – less than 0.01 percent
As a point of emphasis, there is a zero percent chance that the Hawks end up with the 5th pick or the 6th pick, because once the top four picks are assigned and the Hawks are not one of them, there are guaranteed to be at least two teams remaining who will pick before Atlanta.
Hawks Vice President of Player Personnel Daniel Starkman will represent the Hawks in the behind-the-scenes drawing room, while General Manager Onsi Saleh will be on stage for the televised announcement of the results.
As a result of the trade, New Orleans cannot end up with a lottery pick, so they will not have a representative at the event. Atlanta and Milwaukee will get the two picks with, as noted before, Atlanta receiving the better of the two picks. The revealed envelopes will have the Hawks and Bucks logos, so what you see is what you get: If you see a Bucks logo, that pick is going to Milwaukee. If you see a Hawks logo, that pick is going to Atlanta.
The actual lottery procedure takes place away from the stage in a separate room prior to the televised broadcast. Fourteen ping-pong balls numbered 1 through 14 are placed in a lottery machine. There are 1,001 possible combinations when four balls are drawn out of 14, without regard to their order of selection. Before the lottery, 1,000 of those 1,001 combinations are assigned to the 14 participating lottery teams.
The calculation of the odds of the Hawks getting the top pick are relatively straightforward. New Orleans' draft position resulted in them getting 68 of the 1000 combinations, and Milwaukee's draft position saw them get 30. Adding 68 and 30 and dividing that result by 1000 results in 0.098, a 9.8 percent chance. The calculation for the likelihood of them landing in the #2 spot is a more intricate calculation, as are the odds for #3 and #4 spots and so on.
The drawing process occurs as follows: All 14 balls are placed in the lottery machine and mixed for 20 seconds, then the first ball is selected. The process is then repeated three more times in 10-second intervals. The team that has been assigned that four-number combination will receive the No. 1 pick.
This process is repeated with the same ping-pong balls and same machine for picks Nos. 2, 3 and 4. If the same team comes up more than once, the result is discarded, and another four-ball combination is selected. Also, if the one unassigned combination of 11-12-13-14 is drawn, then the result is ignored and the process repeated.
Here is what the selection process looked like last year.
The NBA held a tiebreaker event for its draft order on Apr. 20. New Orleans and Dallas finished with identical 26-56 records. The Hawks got favorable news when New Orleans won the tiebreak over Dallas. It got the Hawks one extra combination from New Orleans in the lottery pool (68 instead of 67, to add to the 30 from Milwaukee) and it ensured that if none of the New Orleans, Milwaukee or Dallas picks jump into the top-4 spots, then the Hawks will pick before Dallas.
With a young core in the place and coming off of a 46-win season that landed them in the playoffs, the Hawks are looking to continue building into a sustainable contender. Sunday's NBA Lottery will determine what the next exciting piece might look like.