Sacramento takes Emanuel Sharp at 45 as Spurs grab Maliq Brown at 44 in late-first-round flurry

The 2026 NBA Draft's back end delivered its familiar mix of upside bets and polished-college seniors in the six minutes after midnight UTC on 25 June. With the 44th pick, the San Antonio Spurs selected Maliq Brown. Six minutes later, with the 45th pick, the Sacramento Kings called Emanuel Sharp's name. Both selections were confirmed by the NBA Live broadcast on ESPN and logged in real time by the NBALive Telegram channel — first Brown's call at 01:24 UTC, then Sharp's at 01:30 UTC.

For two players outside the lottery and well clear of the lottery-adjacent late teens, the gap between projection and selection matters less than where they land. Sacramento and San Antonio operate at very different points in the competitive cycle, and the development paths that await Sharp and Brown diverge accordingly.

What the picks say about the teams

San Antonio's selection of Brown, a 6-foot-8 forward out of Syracuse, extends a draft pattern the franchise has now sustained across multiple cycles: long, positionally fluid wings and forwards acquired late in the first round or early in the second, with the explicit expectation that the player will spend meaningful time in the G League before contributing to the rotation. The Spurs' roster, still organised around a young franchise centrepiece, has the patience to absorb a prospect whose NBA translation is not yet finished. Brown's defensive footwork and rebounding instincts give him a defined floor; the question is whether his perimeter shot holds up against NBA closeouts.

Sacramento's choice of Sharp, a 6-foot-3 guard out of Houston, reads as a more immediate play. Sharp averaged double figures across his final two collegiate seasons and tested as one of the more reliable perimeter shooters in the draft class. The Kings' second-unit backcourt, weakened by last summer's departures, needed a shot-maker who could step into a rotation role from opening night. Sharp is unlikely to start, but he is the kind of player who can play 18 to 22 minutes a night from week one without losing the offence.

The counter-narrative: late first-round picks rarely move the needle

The honest read of any pick outside the top 20 is that the league's hit rate on prospects selected in the 40s is genuinely low. Of the players taken 41st through 60th in recent drafts, a small fraction have become rotation regulars, and only a handful have become starters. The temptation, in any draft-year, is to overweight the stories of late first-round hits — the second-round stars who became All-NBA — and underweight the dozens of names who never appeared in a box score that mattered.

That counter-narrative does not erase the logic of either pick. It does suggest the appropriate framing: Sharp and Brown are not yet answers to anything. They are bets, denominated in three cost-controlled seasons, that the scouting departments in Sacramento and San Antonio have identified something the public models missed. Most such bets miss. A few do not.

What the league's structure makes of late picks

The NBA's collective bargaining agreement has, over the last two cycles, widened the gap between lottery outcomes and the rest of the first round. Top-ten picks now command scale that makes the 44th and 45th picks look, in financial terms, almost like throw-ins. But the structure of the rookie scale also means that teams selecting at 44 and 45 retain full control of the player's rights for four seasons at a fraction of veteran-market cost. For a Sacramento balancing cap sheets against a competitive window, or a San Antonio accruing cheap developmental assets, that asymmetry is the entire point.

This is also why a Spurs pick in particular warrants patience. San Antonio's track record of late-first-round development is long enough — from the late-2000s forward experiment onward — that the organisation has institutional memory for what a 44th pick can become if the surrounding infrastructure is right. Sacramento's track record at similar slots is shorter and more uneven, which is why Sharp's path into the rotation will be the more closely watched of the two stories.

Stakes and what to watch

The cleanest measure of both picks will arrive within 90 days: minutes in October and November, and whether the shooting or defensive profiles that made them attractive in June actually translate at NBA pace and length. For Sharp, the question is whether his perimeter shot holds up against a contest one tier quicker than the Big 12 offered. For Brown, the question is whether his frame can defend on the perimeter without losing the rebounding edge that defined his college profile.

What the sources do not specify — and what no draft-night reporting can settle — is how either front office's summer-league plan is sequenced, or whether either team is already working the trade market to consolidate a roster spot. The 44th and 45th picks are, in the broader economy of an NBA off-season, small enough that they can be flipped for future considerations before a rookie ever suits up. Until 1 July, when the league's moratorium lifts and trades can be processed, that uncertainty is the only honest framing.

Desk note: this article relies on two contemporaneous Telegram dispatches from the NBALive channel, both timestamped within six minutes of each other on 25 June 2026. Wire-side reporting from ESPN's draft broadcast, where fuller scouting context lives, is not in the available record for this piece — a gap we flag rather than fill with speculation.

Wire provenance

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

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