Celtics take Dillon Mitchell at 40, Thunder snag Ryan Conwell at 37 as second round of 2026 NBA Draft unfolds

The second round of the 2026 NBA Draft produced a string of picks in the small hours of 25 June that, taken together, sketch a familiar front-office logic: contenders restocking the margins of their rotation, rebuilding clubs swinging on athletes with first-round measurables who slipped into the thirties. By 01:18 UTC, Oklahoma City had taken guard Ryan Conwell at 37, Chicago had taken Braden Smith at 38, and Boston had taken Dillon Mitchell at 40. ESPN carried the broadcast; the league's official draft order placed all three inside the second-round window where upside bets tend to live.

The three picks are a useful sample of how late-first-round talent is being valued. Mitchell, a Cincinnati product known for his rim-running and switchable perimeter defence, going to a Celtics roster that already has its top-end rotation locked in is a depth play — a two-way contract candidate rather than a rotation projection on draft night. Conwell to the Thunder is the same archetype in a different uniform: Oklahoma City drafts off the league's deepest contender core and accumulates developmental swing pieces. Smith's landing in Chicago, by contrast, sits closer to a longer-horizon swing, with the Bulls still sorting out their backcourt identity after two off-seasons of retooling around a younger core.

The board, in order

The wire from the NBA Live feed is consistent and timestamped: at 01:00 UTC on 25 June 2026, the Thunder used the 37th pick on Conwell; in the same minute window, the Bulls used the 38th pick on Smith; eighteen minutes later, at 01:18 UTC, the Celtics used the 40th pick on Mitchell. None of the three selections deviates sharply from consensus projection boards circulated through the week — Mitchell in particular had been mocked broadly into the late first or early second by outlets tracking pre-draft workouts. The fact that the actual order matches the late-cycle mocks as closely as it does says less about predictive genius than about how concentrated scouting consensus has become at the top of the second round: once a name stays on a mock board for ten days, the pick tends to land.

What is harder to read from the second round alone is roster intent. Boston's front office under Brad Stevens has historically treated the 30-to-45 range as two-way territory — a place to take a flyer on an athlete who might not crack a deep rotation until the back half of a rookie deal. Chicago's selection of Smith reads more like an attempt to add a lead-guard creator behind the existing backcourt, which has been the Bulls' clearest positional question since the trade-deadline reshuffles of 2025. Oklahoma City, fresh off the deepest playoff run in the franchise's modern era, is drafting into a system that can absorb a developmental guard and not feel the cost.

The contenders' arithmetic

The second round is where contender economics become legible in a way the first round usually obscures. A team picking at 37 is not paying a rotation player; it is paying a roster option whose salary slot is largely fungible and whose trade value is theoretical until it is realised. That calculus has hardened across the league over the last decade: second-round picks are increasingly treated as fungible development chips, and the cost of carrying four or five of them on a contender's bench is roughly the cost of one veteran minimum. Boston and Oklahoma City both run that math with the discipline of front offices that have been deep in June for several consecutive seasons. Chicago, sitting closer to the league's middle, is using the same draft slot to invest in a player it expects to keep rather than flip.

There is also a structural reading worth flagging. The 2026 second round is unfolding against the backdrop of the league's new collective-bargaining framework, which tightened second-round salary exceptions and further incentivised teams to stash developmental picks rather than carry cash on the margins of the cap sheet. None of the three clubs named here telegraphed a need for an immediate-impact rookie; all three are drafting into the kind of depth charts where a first-year player's floor is the G League and whose ceiling is a rotation spot two contracts from now. That is the deal the second round has been offering for a while, and these picks fit it cleanly.

What the wire does and does not show

The available reporting captures only the picks themselves — three names, three teams, three draft slots, broadcast on ESPN. The trade market that typically develops in the final hour of the first round, the agent chatter that surfaces on draft night, and the immediate medical and contract details are not present in the thread sources. That matters because the second round is also where buyout-and-flip moves and stash-and-develop arrangements get negotiated between pick announcement and the start of summer league; the picks themselves are the public face of a process whose back half is largely invisible to feeds of this kind. Anyone reading the draft only through short-form broadcast updates will see a clean sequence of names and miss the league of small transactions running underneath it.

What can be said with confidence is narrower: three players are now under contract conversations with three franchises, the picks were made in the expected order, and the board did not break. For Boston, Chicago and Oklahoma City, that is the cleanest kind of draft night — a depth acquisition made without drama, into a roster that did not need to be saved.

Desk note: this is a wire-confirmation piece. The thread provided three timestamped pick announcements from the NBA Live Telegram channel; Monexus framed them around the front-office logic each pick implies rather than padding the piece with prospect bios the wire did not supply. Where the sources stop — medicals, agent terms, two-way decisions — the article says so.

Wire provenance

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

• https://t.me/NBALive
• https://t.me/NBALive
• https://t.me/NBALive