Wizards' Late Picks Influenced by Draft Withdrawal Wave

For as much deserving attention as the Washington Wizards' lottery pick has drawn, it can be easy to forget that the tanking team has three draft picks to play around with entering the final month before the big night.

They're set to make their first pick at #6, but this front office has been rumored to be aggressively exploring strategies to exchange their position for a higher pick or ulterior ways to bring in young support to their rebuilding core.

Leveraging their later picks at #18 and #40 have been tossed around as potential bargaining chips, and a recent news dump regarding all of the talented sub-lottery projected dropping out of the draft process talents directly concerns how the team should treat their deeper draft assets.

Players often mocked to fall somewhere between later in the first round and right at the start of the second like Florida center Alex Condon, Michigan forward Yaxel Landeborg and Arkansas wing Karter Knox all pulled their name from further draft consideration to further diminish an already-scant list of available prospects.

Luckily for Washington, there's still plenty of talent toward the top of the board to choose from on draft night when it's time to make their first selection of the bunch.

Big collegiate programs are certainly wielding more power than they have in the last decade in dangling NIL money in front of young prospects on contending powerhouses, leaving only the players who are absolutely certain they want to make the leap to the NBA.

The Wizards will have no shortage of options to choose from, even with some intriguing names suddenly vanishing from early draft strategies, and the team should ensure that they're happy using the picks on players they like if they're not interested with making any moves up or down in the order.