Every NBA draft pick,
priced.
Draft picks are the NBA's closest thing to a currency. Highly divisible and held by every team, they're central to almost every deal. Yet they're still valued as vague “firsts” and “seconds.” Draft Stash is a draft-pick valuation database, a simplified way to see and value every pick, view exactly what a given team holds, and understand how different protections and swap formats change what a pick is actually worth.
Why it helps
Put a number on every pick
Analysts still trade in vague "firsts" and "seconds," but the #1 pick is worth orders of magnitude more than pick #30. Draft Stash assigns a concrete expected value to all 420 picks so you can compare them directly.
See a team's whole stash
Every pick a team controls, whether outright, protected, or tangled in a swap, in one place, with its value and the odds it actually conveys. No more digging through trade language to learn what a team really owns.
Reason about protections & swaps
Protections, swaps, and backups quietly reshape what a pick is worth. The simulation resolves each one the way the real trade does, so you can see how a top-4 protection or a best-of-three swap changes the math.
How it works
Project the board
Each draft year starts from projected standings, then the real lottery odds are applied to set the order. Years further out are blended toward random (2026 is essentially settled, 2032 is wide open) to reflect how uncertainty grows with time.
Run it 100,000 times
A full seven-year draft board (2026–2032) is generated and re-generated 100,000 times, so every pick gets a distribution of outcomes rather than a single guess.
Resolve every pick by its real rules
In each simulation, all 420 picks are settled exactly as their trades dictate: unprotected conveyances, lottery protections, two- and three-team swaps, conditional backups, and conveyance pools all play out by the letter.
Value each landing spot
Wherever a pick lands, it's scored on a draft-value curve and discounted for how far in the future it is. Average that realized value over every simulation and you have the pick's expected value.
Roll it up
Per-pick results aggregate into ownership probabilities, projected slots, and team-level stash totals: the numbers you see across the site.
The math
The draft-value curve
Every landing spot is scored on a smooth curve normalized so the #1 pick is worth 100 points. Value falls off steeply early and flattens out late: the gap between picks 1 and 5 dwarfs the gap between 40 and 45. The second round starts a notch below the end of the first.
The curve is built from data. We averaged four independent draft-value models, then grounded the result in 22 years of real draft outcomes (2003–2024) — scoring every pick by the career production of the player actually taken there (Win Shares and value over replacement), with each class measured as a share of its own year so old and recent drafts count equally. That's where the steep early drop and long flat tail come from.
Pick value
A pick's value in any one simulation is its slot value, scaled to 100, and discounted 2% per year into the future (a pick this year is worth more than the same slot four years out):
Expected value
Run that over 100,000 simulated drafts and average the value the pick actually delivers to whoever ends up owning it:
Stash value (to a team)
What a pick is worth to a particular team depends on whether it actually lands there. Conditional picks are weighted by their convey probability; swaps already resolve to one held pick, so that pick's value is used directly:
Uncertainty over time
Each year's projected order is blended toward a random one, with the random weight growing linearly over a six-year horizon, so near drafts track the projections and distant ones spread out:
Reading the numbers
A pick's average realized value across all 100,000 simulations, scored on the curve below.
What a pick is worth to a specific team. Conditional picks (protections, backups) are weighted by how often they actually convey; swaps use the value of the pick the team ends up with.
The pick's average draft position across simulations. For example, "7.2" means it lands around the 7th selection on average.
How often each team ends up holding the pick. A pick can have several possible owners when swaps or protections are involved.
The slots in which a pick stays with its original team. If it lands outside that range, it conveys.