Bulls close out second round with Ukrainian forward Ishchenko at pick 56

The Chicago Bulls used the 56th pick of the 2026 NBA Draft on Wednesday to take Vsevelod Ishchenko, closing out a four-minute stretch in which three franchises filled out the back end of their rookie class. The New York Knicks took Nick Martinelli at 55 and the Golden State Warriors selected Lajae Jones at 54, with each pick logged in the draft ticker on ESPN shortly after 02:00 UTC. The three names are now bound to second-round slotting that, by league economics, often means a two-way contract rather than a guaranteed roster place.

The Bulls' selection of a Ukrainian forward is the part of the night that travels. Ishchenko's name crossed the Atlantic at a moment when the league has been visibly broadening its scouting footprint into Central and Eastern Europe. A late second-rounder rarely moves a market, but he joins a class in which several internationals are expected to sign summer-league deals rather than full rookie-scale contracts.

The picks, in order

The Warriors opened this stretch with Lajae Jones at 54. Jones, a wing, had been projected in the late-second-round range on most public boards and gives Golden State another developmental swing on a young perimeter piece. The Knicks, picking 55th, took Nick Martinelli — a versatile forward whose college production drew scout attention for his rebounding rates relative to size. Then, at 56, the Bulls took Ishchenko, a forward whose international background rounds out Chicago's late-draft haul.

None of the three selections carried a first-round economics profile. The 2026 rookie scale for first-round picks runs materially higher than the deals available to late second-rounders, where teams typically offer two-way contracts split between the parent club and its G League affiliate. The relevant question for all three franchises is not whether the pick makes headlines on draft night, but whether the player survives August roster cut-downs.

Why the second round matters less than the first

The second round is where the league's developmental machinery does most of its quiet work. Two-way slots — introduced in the 2017 collective bargaining agreement and since expanded — let clubs carry a player on a roster that pays the NBA minimum only on days the player is active at the parent club, with the rest of the season spent in the G League. That structure has made picks in the 40s and 50s less of a sunk cost and more of an option.

The counter-read is that the second round is increasingly a sorting exercise rather than a scouting one. By the time the draft reaches the mid-50s, the league's analytics departments have largely separated the rotation-likely players from the projects. What follows is a hold-up exercise in which agents and front offices price out guaranteed money against two-way money, and clubs decide how many development slots they can afford to leave open. The market for the 56th pick is, in practical terms, a market for the player's next eighteen months rather than for his career.

The international pipeline

Ishchenko's selection sits inside a trend that front offices have been willing to discuss publicly for several drafts running: the scouting base in Eastern Europe has thickened. The league's European talent has historically concentrated in the Adriatic league system, the Spanish ACB, and increasingly the French Pro A. A Ukrainian project picked in the late fifties — assuming the reports are accurate on his domestic league — fits that pattern of clubs looking for athletic upside they can develop on a two-way rather than pay a market rate for on the open market.

The dominant framing here is straightforward: the NBA's developmental league structure has made the second round a cheap call option rather than a real bet. The plausible counter-read is that late second-rounders still produce useful rotation players more often than the betting-odds framing suggests, particularly when the team's G League affiliate has a clear identity. The evidence on this is mixed, and neither side has a clean record.

Stakes for the three clubs

For the Warriors, Jones is one more developmental swing on a wing slot they have stocked aggressively through the draft over the last half-decade. For the Knicks, Martinelli gives New York another forward to test against the league's increasingly positionless defensive schemes. For the Bulls, Ishchenko extends a foreign-scout pipeline that the front office has been quietly investing in, and the immediate benchmark is whether the player lands a two-way slot rather than a guaranteed contract.

The sources for this story do not specify the contract structures each player is expected to sign, the guaranteed money attached to any of the three picks, or whether any of the three teams plan to convert the selection into a draft-and-stash rather than an immediate roster addition. The available wire traffic captured the three picks as they were read at the desk; what follows is the usual post-draft haggling between agents and front offices that runs through July.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/s/NBALive
• https://t.me/s/NBALive
• https://t.me/s/NBALive
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_NBA_draft
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-way_contract