Suns win top pick, Kings jump to No. 2

CHICAGO — Phoenix general manager Ryan McDonough was onstage moments after the NBA draft lottery ended, talking about the future of the Suns and mentioning how they had the best odds of picking No. 1 overall.

And then he stopped to correct himself.

“We have No. 1,” McDonough said. “I’ve got to adjust to that.”

It’s an adjustment that he and the Suns will happily make.

The worst team in the league this season will pick first in the NBA draft, after the Suns won the draft lottery on Tuesday night. It’s the first time the Suns will have the chance to make the first overall selection.

“It’s great for our franchise,” said McDonough, whose club went 21-61 this season and missed the playoffs for an eighth consecutive year. “It’s something that you say coming into it, you don’t have any control over it so you’re not going to get nervous. And I was here dying. I could barely breathe. I needed an oxygen tank.”

The Suns have three great candidates for No. 1, all with ties to either Arizona or new Phoenix coach Igor Kokoskov. Arizona freshman center Deandre Ayton is widely expected to go No. 1 overall, and he was at the lottery to watch the Suns win the pick. So was Duke’s Marvin Bagley III, an Arizona native.

And Kokoskov is particularly familiar with Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, who will come to the NBA from Real Madrid. Kokoskov coached Slovenia — and Doncic — to the gold medal at the European championships last summer.

Sacramento will pick No. 2 and Atlanta No. 3 — both of them moving up and bucking some odds to get there. The top three spots were determined by the lottery, and then spots 4-14 fell in line of reverse order of record.

Entering the lottery, Sacramento had an 18.3 percent chance of moving into the top three, while Atlanta’s climb was just a slight upset: The Hawks came into the night with a 42.3 percent chance of getting pick 1, 2 or 3.

The rest of the slots, in order: Memphis, Dallas, Orlando, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Los Angeles Clippers (two picks) and Denver.

The draft will be June 21 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

The lottery, which has been around since 1985, was tweaked to a weighted system in 1990 and will be changed again next year in an effort to discourage teams from tanking.

Going forward, the three teams with the worst regular-season records will all have 14 percent chances of winning the No. 1 pick, the fourth-worst team will have a 12.5 percent chance and the fifthworst 10.5 percent. So there will still be a benefit to being bad, but the odds will be so similar among the bottom five teams — a 3.5 percentage-point difference in the race for No. 1, instead of the 16.2 percent gap like this year — that the reward for losing might be lessened.