Spurs take Ja'Kobi Gillespie at 42, Heat pick Otega Oweh at 41 in second round of 2026 NBA Draft
Second-round picks landed in quick succession early Thursday UTC, with Miami taking Oweh at 41 and San Antonio selecting Gillespie at 42 as the 2026 NBA Draft moved past the lottery's headline names.
The 2026 NBA Draft moved into its second round in the early hours of 25 June 2026 UTC, with the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs each using an early second-round selection on a guard. According to live updates from the NBALive Telegram channel, Miami selected Otega Oweh with the 41st overall pick and the Spurs took Ja'Kobi Gillespie with the 42nd pick, both calls logged at 01:18 UTC.
Second-round picks rarely move franchise trajectories, but the back-to-back guard selections — and the two organisations doing the picking — say something about how the league's middle class is being restocked. Both players arrive as depth rather than headline pieces, on Day One of their professional careers.
Who went where
The Heat used the 41st pick on Oweh, a guard whose selection by Miami at 01:18 UTC was logged by NBALive's draft tracker alongside ESPN's broadcast. Pick 42 went to the Spurs on Gillespie, also logged at 01:18 UTC. The two picks landed within the same minute on the Telegram feed, the kind of compressed sequence that defines second-round television: a name, a graphic, a shirt, and the broadcast moves on.
What the public-facing tracker confirms is the order, the teams, and the names. It does not — and is not intended to — provide player-by-player scouting analysis, contract terms, or trade context. Those details typically surface from beat reporters and team announcements in the hours and days after the pick.
The second-round economics
NBA second-round picks operate under a different economic regime than first-rounders. They do not receive the full four-year, fully guaranteed rookie scale contract attached to first-round selections, and teams have historically used them as low-cost roster filler, two-way conversion candidates, or as tradeable assets packaged into larger moves. A late-first or early-second pick that lands on a rotation player represents one of the better return-on-investment propositions available under the league's collective bargaining agreement.
The Heat and Spurs are both organisations accustomed to extracting value from the margins. Miami's development pipeline has a long track record of turning late picks into rotation contributors. San Antonio's reputation in that regard — built over two decades — is well established in league circles even when individual draft hits go under-noticed nationally.
What the tracker does not tell us
The Telegram-sourced log is a timestamp-and-name record, not an analytical one. It does not indicate which team held the picks originally, whether any selection was traded, whether the player was taken on behalf of another organisation, or what guaranteed money is attached. It does not record player measurements, combine results, or pre-draft projection boards. For all of that, the established draft outlets — and the teams themselves, through their own communications — are the primary sources.
A reader relying solely on the live-wire feed gets a clean confirmation that picks 41 and 42 were Oweh to Miami and Gillespie to San Antonio. Anything beyond that requires the next layer of reporting.
Stakes and the next 72 hours
For the two players, the immediate stakes are concrete: summer-league invitations, training-camp contracts, and the chance to convert a late-second-round slot into a roster place. For the two franchises, the picks are low-cost assets whose value will be determined by development outcomes over the next two seasons rather than on draft night. The 2026 draft class will be re-evaluated not by where its members were taken, but by who is still on a roster in 2028.
Desk note: this piece leans on a live-draft Telegram feed rather than wire copy because the thread context for this article contains no other URLs. Where the tracker does not provide detail, the article says so rather than padding with unsourced scouting claims. The next pass — once team press releases and beat reporting land — will fill in the contract, measurement, and trade context this draft-night record cannot.
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/NBA_draft