Late first round of the 2026 NBA Draft: Clippers take Baba Miller at 36, Nuggets grab Trevon Brazile at 35

The tail end of the 2026 NBA Draft's opening round delivered two late first-round selections within minutes of one another on Thursday morning UTC. At 00:48 UTC, the Denver Nuggets used the 35th pick on Trevon Brazile. At 00:54 UTC, the Los Angeles Clippers took Baba Miller at 36. Both announcements came through the NBALive wire as ESPN carried the broadcast, and both moves pushed the league's draft-night narrative into its second-day territory before sunrise on the East Coast of the United States.

These were the kinds of picks that don't typically drive front-page coverage, but they say something about how the league's contender tier is reshaping its margins. The Nuggets, fresh off a deep playoff run with Nikola Jokić at the centre of everything, used a 35th pick to add length on the wing. The Clippers, operating without a first-rounder in the lottery for the second consecutive cycle, picked up an international prospect with the 36th. In a draft defined less by a single franchise-altering name and more by positional depth, that is exactly the kind of move a win-now roster is supposed to make.

What the picks tell us about the board

Brazile, a long forward with defensive switchability, fits the profile of a player Denver has historically developed on the margins. The Nuggets' front office under Calvin Booth has shown a consistent preference for athletes who can guard multiple positions and play off Jokić's gravity, and Brazile fits that mould. The 35th pick is rarely where a star is found, but it is increasingly where rotation depth is paid for. That matters when a team is staring at a luxury-tax bill and a narrow championship window.

Miller's path to the Clippers at 36 is the more interesting of the two for a different reason. A draft-and-stash candidate or a two-way-contract gamble, depending on how his rights are handled, Miller represents exactly the kind of low-cost, high-upside swing that franchises with limited late-first-round capital are now treating as standard practice. The Clippers have used the international and developmental pipeline effectively in recent years, and a late first-rounder who does not require an immediate roster spot is, in the league's accounting, almost free optionality.

The counter-narrative: late first-round picks rarely matter

It is worth saying plainly that the league's history is not kind to the 35th and 36th overall selections. The hit rate on players taken in that range who become rotation-quality NBA contributors is low — single-digit percentages across a typical draft class. The 2016 draft, for example, produced very little of note from the back half of the first round. The 2020 class is still settling. The structural reality is that the value of picks in this range is closer to a futures contract on a G League rotation player than it is to a meaningful roster upgrade.

That framing matters because the draft-night coverage tends to flatten these moments. Every pick, in the broadcast grammar of ESPN's coverage, is presented as a potential franchise shift. The reality is that two picks taken six minutes apart near the end of the first round are, in the league's actual labour market, more likely to end up as trade chips than as rotation regulars. The Nuggets and Clippers both know that. The question is whether their analytics and development staffs can extract more from the pick than the market historically has.

What it sits inside

The 2026 draft has been discussed in advance as a deep class, but the early returns have been defined more by trade activity at the top of the board than by a transcendent prospect. That structural fact — a draft without a clear #1 — pushes more of the league's attention toward the middle of the round, where role-player and developmental selections begin to define a team's depth chart. Picks 35 and 36 sit in the awkward territory between the first and second rounds, where teams are still technically drafting under the league's rookie-scale compensation structure but are no longer expected to find a starter. It is a zone where the league's competitive balance mechanisms interact with its labour-market economics, and where the analytics departments of contending teams have a genuine edge.

The Nuggets' pick suggests continuity with their existing model: long athletes, switchable defenders, players who can survive in a Jokić-led system. The Clippers' pick is harder to read in real time, because the player and the team's plans for him have not yet been publicly detailed. What is clear is that both front offices used the late first round to address depth rather than to swing for upside, which is what a mature contender tier is supposed to do.

Stakes and what to watch

The practical stakes of picks 35 and 36 are modest. The Nuggets add a developmental forward to a system that already develops them well; the Clippers add a low-cost international asset. The more interesting question is what happens to these players in the next 90 days. Summer-league performance, two-way-contract decisions, and any August trade activity will determine whether the picks are remembered at all.

What remains uncertain, and what the available wire coverage does not yet resolve, is how Miller's international status will be handled. If he is stashed overseas, the Clippers gain a future trade chip and a 2027 roster slot. If he is brought to camp, he competes for a two-way deal. Brazile's role in Denver is more straightforward, but the question of whether the Nuggets can convert a 35th pick into a rotation player at all is a genuine test of the development infrastructure the franchise has spent the last five years building. Neither question will be answered on draft night. Both will be answered by Christmas.

This article reports the 35th and 36th selections of the 2026 NBA Draft as they came through the NBALive wire on 25 June 2026, and is limited to what those two announcements directly establish. Monexus frames these picks as a study in late-first-round roster construction rather than as franchise-shifting events, in line with the historical hit rate of selections in this range.

Wire provenance

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

• https://t.me/s/NBALive
• https://t.me/s/NBALive
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_NBA_draft
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Miller
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevon_Brazile