I'll admit, after last year's ranking of every traded first-round pick in the NBA , I assumed I'd discovered the pattern. The 2022 ranking included 47 draft picks. The 2023 ranking had 56. Last year , we got up to 68. I figured we were headed for linear growth and that this year, we'd land somewhere around No. 80. As our headline suggests, that isn't what happened. We landed at 63.

The raw number of traded first-round picks has, for the first time in the history of this series, actually gone down. Some of that was due to the unusually high number of 2025 picks that were moved ahead of time. Usually, the upcoming draft features more traded first-round picks than any other. Last year, there were 19 traded 2025 picks to rank ... and that was almost a full year before that draft

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