Late picks shuffle the second round: Nets, Knicks, Mavericks and Nuggets fill out their benches

The Brooklyn Nets called the 33rd pick at 00:36 UTC on 25 June 2026 and took Isaiah Evans. An hour later, with the 43rd selection, they grabbed Tyler Bilodeau. By the time the second round staggered to its close in the early hours of the morning, the New York Knicks, Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets had each added a piece to a bench that, on draft night at least, cost them very little and told the rest of the league something about how they intend to fill out the margins.

This is the part of the draft the cameras leave early for. Lottery picks get the green rooms, the jersey pulls, the agent handshakes, the escalator ride to a sit-down with Maria Taylor. The second round, by contrast, is a production line. Names arrive in groups, suits get wrinkled, phone calls interrupt hugs. But it is also where the most ruthless work of roster construction happens, the kind of moves that don't make a front page until a contributor drops 18 in a February game that flips a playoff series.

Brooklyn's small pile of upside

The Nets' 33rd pick, Isaiah Evans, was the headline of their night, the only selection that landed in the upper tier of the second round. Their second move came ten picks later at 41, when Bilodeau's name flashed across the screen. Two picks is what Brooklyn walked away with, and two picks is what they needed: the front office that has spent the better part of two years disassembling a contender is no longer in the business of stockpiling for the sake of it. Evans is the swing. Bilodeau is the insurance. Both will get a summer league and, if they are lucky, a longer look in October.

What matters here is the curve of the pick. Number 33 is where the draft's first-round talent starts to bleed into the second-round lottery tickets. Evans is a bet on a player the rest of the board had moved off, for whatever reason: a medical, a fit question, a stat the analytics department didn't love. Bilodeau at 41 is later, cheaper, and a more conventional swing. The Nets have the cap space to keep both on the roster. Whether they do depends on what the rest of free agency looks like.

Knicks hold the line at 47

New York used the 47th pick on Tyler Nickel at 01:42 UTC, a selection that arrived in the same minute as Dallas's pick a slot later, the two announcements back to back on the NBA Live feed. There is no drama to a single late second-round pick unless you are the player hearing your name, and for the Knicks the calculus is straightforward. They have a contender to run back. They have a bench that needs bodies who can survive in Tom Thibodeau's minutes. Nickel is a flier on the kind of wing every Thibodeau team eventually needs, a long, switchable defender who, on a good night, can knock down a corner three.

The Knicks did not trade up. They did not trade down. They did not bundle the pick into a salary dump. The pick is the pick, and now it is the player's problem to make it worth something.

Dallas at 48, Denver at 49

Tobi Lawal went to Dallas at 48. Bryce Hopkins went to Denver at 49, announced six minutes after the Mavericks' selection. These are the picks that make the second round feel like a slow conveyor belt. Dallas, like New York, is operating around a win-now core, and Lawal is a depth signing in everything but contract status. Denver is operating around a win-now core that just watched a long playoff run end short of where it wanted, and Hopkins is a forward with the kind of physical profile that fits the Nuggets' switchable, positionless identity.

Two picks, two minutes apart, two teams with similar problems: a second unit that was exposed in May, a bench that cost them a series they probably should have been in. Neither Lawal nor Hopkins is going to fix that by October. But the second round is not where rosters are fixed. It is where the long tail of a roster starts to take shape, the place where a 15th man becomes a 10th man becomes a rotation player over a three-year arc that almost no one watches in real time.

The second round as front-office tell

The pattern across these five picks is more revealing than any individual name. Brooklyn is in asset-collection mode and used two picks to do it. New York, Dallas and Denver are all operating in win-now windows and used a single late pick each, treating the selection as a low-cost lottery ticket rather than a foundational piece. The Philadelphia 76ers, the Miami Heat, the Boston Celtics, the kind of teams that swing on second-round picks as if their cap sheet depended on it, were not the teams making news in this window. These were the teams at the back of the bench, adding bodies, hoping one of them turns into something.

The draft, taken as a whole, will be graded on lottery picks and trades. The second round, by contrast, is graded on a three-year curve, the kind of evaluation that only the most patient front offices survive. For the Nets, Knicks, Mavericks and Nuggets, the names Evans, Bilodeau, Nickel, Lawal and Hopkins are now entries in a long ledger. Some of those entries will be worth something. Most of them won't. The job, on a night like this one, is to keep writing them down.

What comes next

Summer league opens in mid-July in Las Vegas and Sacramento, the first public viewing window for every name in this piece. Roster decisions follow in August and September, the deadline for converting any of these second-round deals into fully guaranteed contracts. By the time training camp opens in late September, the bench that takes the floor in any of these four cities will look, in part, like the one these picks are trying to make.

Sources

• NBA Live (Telegram), 33rd pick announcement, Isaiah Evans to Brooklyn, 2026-06-25T00:36Z
• NBA Live (Telegram), 43rd pick announcement, Tyler Bilodeau to Brooklyn, 2026-06-25T01:24Z
• NBA Live (Telegram), 47th pick announcement, Tyler Nickel to New York, 2026-06-25T01:42Z
• NBA Live (Telegram), 48th pick announcement, Tobi Lawal to Dallas, 2026-06-25T01:42Z
• NBA Live (Telegram), 49th pick announcement, Bryce Hopkins to Denver, 2026-06-25T01:48Z
• NBA Live (Telegram), Milwaukee Bucks first-round picks Nate Ament and Brayden Burries throw first pitches at Brewers game, 2026-06-27T02:48Z
• NBA Live (Telegram), Darryn Peterson draft-night remarks, 2026-06-27T18:45Z
• ESPN, Blues acquire Brandon Carlo from Maple Leafs for pair of third-round picks, 2026-06-27T17:48Z
• ESPN, Ducks trade Mason McTavish to Blues for Nos. 15 and 29 picks, 2026-06-27T03:03Z

Desk note: Monexus framed this as a front-office behaviour piece, not a player-grading piece, because the second round is where the most interesting roster signals live and the player-evaluation cable shows have the rest covered.