Hawks take Ngoy at 57, Knicks grab Martinelli at 55: late-round movement in the 2026 NBA Draft

The 2026 NBA Draft's back end closed in the small hours of 25 June with two picks that said more about the league's international and second-tier talent pipeline than about its star-making machinery. At 02:18 UTC, the New York Knicks used the 55th overall selection on Nick Martinelli. Twelve minutes later, at 02:30 UTC, the Atlanta Hawks took Narcisse Ngoy at 57. Both announcements moved through the NBA Live wire on Telegram, in step with ESPN's broadcast of the draft, and both illustrate how second-round decisions are increasingly made in rooms the cameras never see.

The 55th and 57th picks rarely move franchise fortunes, but they do shape roster margins — the difference between a roster full of guaranteed money or a couple of two-way contracts; the difference between a player who spends a year in the G League and one who sticks. That is the lens through which both moves matter.

What we know about the picks

The public record is thin, on purpose. By the time a draft reaches the 50s, teams have stopped announcing anything beyond the name. The Knicks' 55th pick, Martinelli, arrives in New York with the franchise already carrying a full guard rotation and a payroll that has required creative apron work in recent windows. The Hawks' 57th pick, Ngoy, lands in Atlanta at the bottom of a board the team has used to stockpile frontcourt length in recent cycles. Neither selection came with a trade attached, based on what the wire carried in the moments after each announcement.

Front offices at this stage of the draft are not drafting starters. They are drafting optionality: a stretch big on a two-way deal, a wing who might shoot 38 percent from three in a vacuum, a defensive specialist whose path to minutes runs through a specific matchup. Ngoy and Martinelli will be evaluated against that lower bar, not the one that applies to lottery picks.

The late-round international pipeline

Late second-round picks in the modern NBA are disproportionately international, and the 2026 class appears to follow that pattern. The economics push in that direction. American prospects who go unpicked by the mid-50s usually have NBA-level fallback options in the NCAA transfer portal or in NIL-driven returns to college; a team can re-draft them next year. International prospects, by contrast, face a harder set of choices — return to a European league, sign a multi-year deal overseas, or accept a two-way slot in the United States. That asymmetry means a 55th or 57th pick is more likely to convert into a rostered player when the name on the card is a prospect whose domestic league will not wait another cycle.

It is worth being honest about the limits of what is publicly verifiable from the two wire items that drove this story. The Telegram feed carried the names and the team logos; it did not carry scouting reports, contract terms, or pre-draft workout notes. Any deeper read of either player — their college production, their measurables, their pro comparables — would require the kind of sourcing this newsroom does not have on hand for a 55th and 57th pick. Readers looking for scouting analysis should treat the wire names as a starting point, not a conclusion.

What the league's broadcast does and does not show

ESPN's draft broadcast, by the time it reaches pick 50, has shed most of its analytical scaffolding. The green room is largely empty. The families clustered in the stands are smaller groups. The trade market, which thinned out in the late teens, is effectively dormant. What replaces the pageantry is the league's working infrastructure: team video coordinators who have watched the prospect's last two seasons three times each; international scouts who filed written reports after every game in a regional league most American viewers cannot name; capologists running the second-round exception math in real time. The picks themselves are public; the decision-making around them is not.

That asymmetry is part of the point. By the time a name is read on stage, the question of whether the pick will matter has already been settled inside the team's war room. The audience is watching the announcement, not the choice.

Stakes and what to watch

The short-term stakes are concrete. Two-way contracts, Exhibit 10 deals, and Summer League invitations will determine whether Ngoy and Martinelli are Hawks and Knicks next October or whether their names resurface only in overseas transaction wires. For the franchises, the cost of a 55th or 57th pick that does not convert is essentially zero against the cap; the upside, if a rotation player emerges, is real. For the players, the calculus is less forgiving. Late-second-round picks who do not stick face a shrinking pool of mid-tier professional opportunities in Europe and a G League salary that does not cover a full year.

The plausible alternative read of the same facts is straightforward: these two moves may not matter at all. The Knicks' and Hawks' seasons will be decided by the players taken in the first round, the veterans they re-sign, and the trades they make between now and February. The 55th and 57th picks are footnotes in those stories, not chapters. Both readings are defensible. The honest answer is that nobody — not the teams, not the broadcast, not the wire that carried the names — knows which side of that line Ngoy and Martinelli will land on. That uncertainty is the actual product of the second round, and the only honest way to write about it is to say so.

Desk note: Monexus carried the late-round draft names as the wire delivered them — minimal scaffolding, no scouting claims we could not source, and an explicit acknowledgement of how thin the public record is once the draft passes pick 50.

Wire provenance

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

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