The 2026 NBA draft lottery will be held at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago, Illinois, on Sunday, and Charles Barkley hopes the Oklahoma City Thunder, of all teams, gets the No. 1 pick. The juggernaut Thunder are hoping to become the first team to defend their championship in the 2020s, but Barkley explained on Inside the NBA on Saturday why he wants them to win the lottery.
“I’m not even going to lie,” Barkley said. “I’m praying they win the lottery to stop tanking. That would be karma for OKC to win the lottery after all this tanking that went on. Wouldn’t that be karma, [Shaquille O’Neal]?”
Shaquille O’Neal did agree with Barkley. These two, like so many others, hated how teams were tanking in the second half of the regular season. You had teams like the Utah Jazz benching their big names during games, seemingly to ensure they lost. There were also tanking allegations thrown at the Sacramento Kings, as they ruled out multiple players with season-ending injuries.
We were seemingly seeing one blowout after another as playoff teams kept wiping the floor with these lowly undermanned sides. Barkley hopes none of them are rewarded with the No. 1 pick.
The Washington Wizards, Indiana Pacers, and Brooklyn Nets have the joint-best odds to get the No. 1 pick at 14.0%. The Thunder, meanwhile, have just a 1.5% chance. They are in this position, despite being a playoff team, as they have the right to swap picks with the Los Angeles Clippers as part of the infamous Paul George trade in 2019.
It has already been talked about as the worst NBA trade of all time, with the Thunder notably getting Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the draft pick that turned into Jalen Williams from it. Add in the No. 1 pick of this draft, which would get them an incredible talent like AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, or Cameron Boozer, and we might look at this as the worst trade in all of sports history.
The Thunder don’t exactly need any more elite talent. They went 68-14 in 2024-25 and won the NBA championship. They have followed that up by going 64-18 in 2025-26 and are currently up 3-0 on the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference Semifinals. You wouldn’t bet against them becoming the first team to win back-to-back titles since the Golden State Warriors accomplished the feat in 2017 and 2018.
The Warriors, of course, are a very big reason why the Thunder have this lottery pick. The Clippers had finished ninth in the Western Conference with a 42-40 record and would have made the playoffs had they won two games in a row in the play-in tournament. They wouldn’t even win one, though.
The Warriors beat the Clippers 126-121 on April 15 to send them packing. That loss put the Thunder in the lottery. They are slotted at No. 12 and have an 86.1% to get the No. 12 pick. That is the most likely outcome, but they can jump a lot higher. We mentioned the odds for No. 1, and to go with it, they have a 1.7% chance at No. 2, 1.9% at No. 3, and 2.1% at No. 4. Rival teams would be hoping and praying the Thunder remain No. 12.
Getting back to Barkley’s point about punishing teams for tanking, it should also be pointed out that the Thunder did some of that, too. They went 22-50 in 2o20-21 and 24-58 in 2021-22. That helped the Thunder land Josh Giddey and Chet Holmgren. Holmgren is one of their best players, while they traded Giddey to get Alex Caruso. So, the Thunder aren’t as clean as Barkley thinks they are.
