2006 NBA draft

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2006 NBA draft unfolded on the 28th of June, 2006, inside The Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City, broadcast nationally on ESPN. An Italian power forward named Andrea Bargnani walked to the podium first, shaking hands with commissioner David Stern, becoming only the second player without competitive experience in the United States to go first overall in NBA history. The questions hanging over that night were many. Could a draft class so dominated by international and underclassmen talent reshape several franchises at once? Would the trades quietly arranged in the months and even years before draft night pay off? And what did it mean that the league had, for the very first time since 1995, barred every high school prospect from entering at all?

• 2. Bargnani and the Lottery

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  Toronto Raptors won the right to pick first by beating odds of just 8.8 percent, despite holding only the fifth-worst record in the league. The lottery was held on the 23rd of May, 2006, in Secaucus, New Jersey. The Portland Trail Blazers had entered that room as the most likely team to land the top selection, but fell out of the top three entirely and settled for the fourth pick, the lowest position the lottery rules allowed them to fall. Chicago, operating with the New York Knicks' first-round pick acquired in a trade the previous October, landed second overall.

  Bargnani had spent three years playing with Italian club Benetton Treviso before his name was called in New York. His selection made him the successor to a single predecessor in that rare category: Yao Ming, who went first overall in the 2002 NBA draft without U.S. college experience. At the time of the draft, that was a lineage of exactly two. The Raptors' unexpected lottery victory set the stage for a chain of draft-day trades that would define which teams actually benefited from the evening's choices.

• 3. Portland's Draft-Day Maneuvering

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  Portland walked out of draft night holding players they had not technically drafted. The Trail Blazers gave up the fourth pick, Tyrus Thomas from LSU, along with Viktor Khryapa, to Chicago in exchange for the rights to second-overall pick LaMarcus Aldridge from the University of Texas, plus a future second-round selection. In a separate move, Portland acquired the draft rights to the sixth pick, Brandon Roy from the University of Washington, by sending Minnesota the rights to seventh pick Randy Foye of Villanova.

  Roy, not Bargnani, would take home the Rookie of the Year award for the 2006-07 season, despite going sixth. His path to Portland ran through two earlier trades: Boston had sent Portland's eventual seventh pick, along with Raef LaFrentz and Dan Dickau, in exchange for Sebastian Telfair, Theo Ratliff, and a 2008 second-round pick. The Trail Blazers also used the 30th pick, which had originated with the Detroit Pistons, to draft Joel Freeland of Gran Canaria in Spain. Three players, three different paths through the trade machinery, all landing in Portland the same night.

• 4. Connecticut's Historic Night

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  Rudy Gay heard his name called eighth, becoming the first of four University of Connecticut players selected in the first round. Hilton Armstrong went 12th, Marcus Williams 22nd, and Josh Boone 23rd. That quartet tied the record for first-round selections from a single school, a mark previously set by Duke University in 1999 and matched by the University of North Carolina in 2005.

  Connecticut pushed further into the record books when Denham Brown was taken in the second round. Five players from one school in a two-round draft was unprecedented. The program joined eight other schools that had ever placed five players in a single draft, trailing only UNLV, which had placed six players in the 1977 draft. That 1977 draft ran eight rounds, a format long since abandoned, making UConn's achievement across the two-round modern format all the more striking. Rudy Gay's own path that night involved a trade: Houston packaged him with Stromile Swift and sent both to Memphis in exchange for Shane Battier, a deal finalized on the 12th of July, 2006.

• 5. New Rules, New Entrants

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  The 2006 draft was the first to operate under a new collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association that closed the door on high school prospects. From 1995 through 2005, a player could declare straight out of high school. Starting in 2006, any player who had graduated from a U.S. high school had to wait at least one year past their graduating class and had to turn 19 during the calendar year of the draft, meaning they had to be born on or before the 31st of December, 1987.

  International players faced a separate standard. The CBA defined an international player as someone who had permanently resided outside the United States for three years before the draft, had not completed high school in the U.S., and had never enrolled at an American university. Such a player was automatically eligible once their 22nd birthday fell during or before the draft year. Nine international players successfully applied as early entries for 2006, arriving from France, Italy, Israel, Croatia, Ukraine, Serbia, Spain, Belgium, and Nigeria. On the 19th of June, 2006, the NBA announced that 37 college players and 10 international players had filed as early-entry candidates, while 47 players who had previously declared had since withdrawn. Of the 92 college underclassmen who had initially expressed interest, exactly 46 ultimately remained in the draft.

• 6. Green Room and the Draft's Missing Names

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  The NBA invited only 15 prospects to sit in the green room at Madison Square Garden, fewer than the previous year. The green room itself had evolved considerably since the 1980 NBA draft, when national television coverage first pushed the event into a live spectacle where players waited in real time before walking up to shake commissioner David Stern's hand. By 2006, the invitees were chosen by collective vote among the NBA's team presidents and general managers.

  Notably absent from those invitations were future All-Stars Rajon Rondo, who went 21st to Phoenix before his rights were traded to Boston, and Kyle Lowry, who went 24th to Memphis out of Villanova. Paul Millsap of Louisiana Tech, taken 47th, also went uninvited. There was also apparent confusion around whether the invitation extended to Marcus Williams may have been meant for Thabo Sefolosha, and Mouhamed Sene of Verviers-Pepinster in Belgium received no invitation despite being considered a top-16 prospect. As of 2026, Kyle Lowry stands as the only player from the entire 2006 draft class still active in the NBA.

• 7. A Draft Under a Displaced Team's Name

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  The New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets used the 12th pick to select Hilton Armstrong from Connecticut and the 15th pick to select Cedric Simmons from NC State. That hyphenated franchise name appeared in the draft records for the only time in NBA history. New Orleans was still recovering from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the Hornets had shared their operations between New Orleans and Oklahoma City throughout the 2005-06 season.

  The 15th pick itself had arrived via a pre-draft trade made on the 26th of October, 2005, in which New Orleans/Oklahoma City acquired a first-round pick from Milwaukee in exchange for Jamaal Magloire. The franchise's dual identity that season made its lone draft appearance in June 2006 a footnote unlike any other in the event's history. Rajon Rondo's own draft path ran through Phoenix, which had assembled the 21st pick through a chain of transactions stretching back to a trade involving the L.A. Lakers, Atlanta, and Boston, anchored by the Shaquille O'Neal deal that sent O'Neal from Los Angeles to Miami on the 14th of July, 2004.