The Biggest Busts in NBA History

The biggest busts in NBA history are the players who never matched their draft slot — the ones picked at the top of the lottery and remembered for everything they didn't become. A bust isn't just a flop. It's the gap between projection and reality, multiplied by the names taken right after them. Some of the players below had perfectly competent careers and would be celebrated as solid pros if anyone else had drafted them. The problem is that they were chosen ahead of generational talent, or chosen first overall and produced a fraction of what a first overall pick is supposed to. The list below mixes injury heartbreaks, scouting misses, and one #1 pick whose career ended four seasons after it began.

What Makes a Bust?

The honest definition has three parts. Draft slot expectations — a #1 pick is held to a different standard than a #14 pick. Career output relative to that slot — not raw stats, but how much the team got back for spending a premium asset. Opportunity cost — the All-Stars, MVPs, and Hall of Famers taken directly after. A player who averaged 15 points a night and lasted 10 years can still be a bust if Stephen Curry was on the board four picks later. By that rubric, the names below all qualify. None of them were "bad" basketball players — some were genuinely good — but every one of them is remembered for the gap.

Anthony Bennett — #1, 2013, Cleveland Cavaliers

The headliner of the modern era. Cleveland took Bennett first overall in 2013 — a class that included Victor Oladipo, C.J. McCollum, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, who slipped to #15 — and Bennett produced 4.4 points and 3.1 rebounds per game across 151 career games over four NBA seasons before washing out of the league entirely. He was traded in his rookie year as part of the Andrew Wiggins / Kevin Love package, bounced to Minnesota, Toronto, and Brooklyn, and never started in earnest. No first overall pick in NBA history flamed out faster, and he became the answer to a trivia question while Giannis was still in his first full NBA season. Bennett is consistently ranked as the worst #1 pick in league history.

Sam Bowie — #2, 1984, Portland Trail Blazers

Bowie's career was actually fine — 10.9 points, 7.5 rebounds, and 1.78 blocks per game over ten seasons. The reason he sits on every bust list is the player picked one slot after him: Michael Jordan. Portland chose Bowie to pair Hakeem Olajuwon's #1 selection with a power-forward complement to Clyde Drexler, leaving the Bulls to scoop up the greatest player ever at #3. Charles Barkley went #5 in the same draft. John Stockton went #16. Bowie's name has become a permanent monument to draft-night risk — proof that even a competent NBA career is a disaster if you were taken in front of an all-time top-five player. Five leg surgeries limited him to 139 games in five seasons with the Blazers, and the franchise has been answering for the pick ever since.

Greg Oden — #1, 2007, Portland Trail Blazers

A different kind of bust: not a scouting miss but a body that wouldn't hold up. Oden was the consensus top prospect of his class — a dominant Ohio State freshman who looked like a Bill Russell-style defensive anchor — and the Blazers took him over Kevin Durant. Microfracture surgery cost him his entire rookie year before he played a single NBA minute. Subsequent knee surgeries cost him most of the next four seasons. He played 105 NBA games total across three seasons with Portland and Miami, averaging 8.0 points and 6.2 rebounds when on the floor. Durant, picked one slot later, became a four-time scoring champion, a Finals MVP, and one of the most efficient scorers in NBA history. Portland's franchise arc may be the single most expensive medical history in pro sports.

Markelle Fultz — #1, 2017, Philadelphia 76ers

The most baffling case on the list. Fultz arrived at Washington as a 23-points-a-game guard with a smooth jumper and a 47% college field-goal percentage. The Sixers traded up from #3 to take him #1 overall, ahead of Lonzo Ball, Jayson Tatum, De'Aaron Fox, and Donovan Mitchell. Then something happened to his shoulder, and his shot — the part of his game that made him a #1 pick — disappeared. He attempted zero three-pointers in his first four NBA games. He was eventually diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome, a nerve condition that disrupted his arm motion. He played 33 games as a Sixer across two seasons and was traded to Orlando, where he became a competent backup point guard with a career 9.2 points per game. Tatum, taken right after him, became a multiple-time All-NBA selection. Fultz's career isn't over, but the player Philadelphia drafted simply never showed up.

Darko Miličić — #2, 2003, Detroit Pistons

The 2003 draft is one of the deepest in NBA history: LeBron at #1, then Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade taken at #3, #4, and #5. Detroit picked Darko at #2. He scored 152 total points in 96 games as a Piston — 1.6 a night, in 5.8 minutes per game — and won a championship in 2004 mostly by being on the bench. He bounced through six teams over a ten-year career and retired with the Pistons-era stat line that still defines the pick. The single best decision Detroit could have made at #2 was selecting anyone else in the next three slots; instead they took the player every scout was certain of based on his unicorn-style international profile. Darko is the cautionary tale every front office uses when a 7-footer flashes shooting touch overseas.

Kwame Brown — #1, 2001, Washington Wizards

The first high schooler ever taken with the #1 overall pick — chosen by Michael Jordan himself, as Wizards GM. Brown stuck around the league for 12 seasons and 510 games, but the production never came: 6.6 points and 5.5 rebounds per game career, bouncing between seven franchises after Washington gave up on him. His best season was 2003–04, when he started 57 games and averaged 10.9 points and 7.4 rebounds. That would have been a competent return on a late-first pick. As the #1 overall, taken ahead of Pau Gasol (#3), Joe Johnson (#10), Tony Parker (#28), and Gilbert Arenas (#31), it became a fixture of the "what if" draft replays. The pick has been re-litigated for two decades. He wasn't a disaster as a human being; he was just never a #1.

Editorial illustration: The Biggest Busts in NBA History

Hasheem Thabeet — #2, 2009, Memphis Grizzlies

Memphis chose the 7'3" UConn shot-blocker over James Harden, Stephen Curry, and DeMar DeRozan — three All-Stars taken in the same lottery. Thabeet averaged 3.1 points and 3.6 rebounds in 68 games as a rookie, and on February 25, 2010, became the highest-drafted player ever sent to the D-League. He played four NBA seasons across three teams before disappearing from the league with career averages of 2.2 points and 2.7 rebounds per game. Curry and Harden, taken at #7 and #3 the same night, would combine for four MVPs and reshape the way the game is played. The Thabeet pick is the canonical example of why physical tools alone — height, reach, shot-blocking instinct — don't translate without skill, agility, or NBA-level conditioning.

Michael Olowokandi — #1, 1998, Los Angeles Clippers

The Clippers took Olowokandi first overall ahead of Mike Bibby, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Dirk Nowitzki, and Paul Pierce — five All-Stars in the next nine picks. He averaged 8.3 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 1.4 blocks over a 500-game career split between four franchises. His best stretch came in his 323 games with the Clippers, where he posted 9.9 points and 8.0 rebounds — solid backup-center production for what was supposed to be a face-of-the-franchise pick. The selection became a punchline for late-90s Clippers dysfunction and a touchstone for evaluators who chase project big men with raw measurables. Vince Carter and Dirk Nowitzki, both taken behind him, are first-ballot Hall of Famers. Olowokandi never made an All-Star team.

Andrea Bargnani — #1, 2006, Toronto Raptors

The first European player taken first overall, Bargnani was supposed to be Dirk Nowitzki 2.0 — a 7-foot floor-stretcher with shooting touch and modern positional versatility. He averaged 14.3 points and 4.6 rebounds over 550 career games for the Raptors, Knicks, and Nets. The raw scoring number isn't bad. What sinks him on this list is the talent taken right after: LaMarcus Aldridge at #2, Brandon Roy at #6, Rajon Rondo at #21, and Kyle Lowry at #24. Bargnani had the offensive skillset Toronto wanted but never developed the defense or rebounding a 7-footer needs to anchor a roster. He finished his career as a 14-points-a-night specialist on bad teams, when the franchise had drafted him to be a cornerstone. Lowry, picked 23 slots later, became the Raptors' franchise leader in nearly every category and won them a championship.

Adam Morrison — #3, 2006, Charlotte Bobcats

Morrison was the National Player of the Year at Gonzaga, the nation's leading scorer at 28.1 points per game in 2005–06, and a marketing-friendly mustache enthusiast. The Bobcats took him #3 overall ahead of Brandon Roy (#6), Rondo (#21), and Kyle Lowry (#24). He averaged 11.8 points as a rookie while shooting 37% from the floor, then tore his ACL in a 2007 preseason game against the Lakers. By his mid-20s he was out of the NBA with a career line of 7.5 points per game and two reserve championship rings from his time on the back end of the Lakers' bench. The Gonzaga promise never made the jump — partly because of the knee, partly because his game had always relied on skill and effort over athleticism, and the NBA leveled that advantage immediately.

Joe Smith — #1, 1995, Golden State Warriors

The forgotten #1 bust. Smith was the College Player of the Year at Maryland — 20.8 points, 10.6 rebounds, 3.0 blocks per game as a sophomore — and the Warriors picked him first overall ahead of Antonio McDyess (#2), Jerry Stackhouse (#3), Rasheed Wallace (#4), Kevin Garnett (#5), and Damon Stoudamire (#7). Smith had a long, journeyman 16-season career — 1,030 games across 12 different franchises, an NBA record at the time — averaging 10.9 points and 6.4 rebounds. Perfectly fine numbers. As a #1 pick chosen ahead of Kevin Garnett, those numbers are a quiet catastrophe. Smith never made an All-Star team; Garnett made 15, won an MVP, and is now in the Hall of Fame. The Warriors moved on from Smith in 2.5 seasons.

Honorable Mentions

A few names linger on the edge of the conversation:

Pervis Ellison — #1, 1989, Sacramento Kings. "Never Nervous Pervis" was supposed to be a defensive anchor coming out of Louisville. He played 474 NBA games over 11 seasons but only started about a third of them, averaging 9.5 points and 6.7 rebounds. He won the Most Improved Player award in 1992 — the only time the #1 overall in his class generated headlines for any reason.
LaRue Martin — #1, 1972, Portland Trail Blazers. Maybe the original #1 bust. Martin averaged 5.3 points and 4.6 rebounds over a four-year career, taken ahead of Hall of Famers Bob McAdoo (#2) and Julius Erving (#12).
Anthony Davis Jr. and the modern "wait and see" picks. Several recent #1 selections — Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns, Ben Simmons — have produced careers that haven't matched their hype despite being legitimately good players. None are on the bust list yet, but the discourse follows the same shape.

What These Picks Have in Common

Read the list end-to-end and a few patterns emerge. Five of the worst busts were big men — Bowie, Oden, Bargnani, Olowokandi, Thabeet, Darko. Pre-modern scouting overweighted height and reach. Teams kept gambling on 7-footers with one elite physical tool, hoping the skill would catch up. It rarely did. Two of the most painful were health stories — Oden and Fultz — and both came from highly-regarded prospects whose mechanics were destroyed by something doctors couldn't fully fix on a timeline. The "drafted ahead of greatness" framing skews the list. Sam Bowie had a credible career; he's only remembered because Jordan went next. Darko's career was less defensible, but it's the LeBron/Melo/Bosh/Wade context that makes it iconic. And every list is partially a Portland Trail Blazers tragedy — the franchise drafted both Bowie and Oden, and a generation of fans grew up watching the wrong knee photos circulate before each preseason.

The lesson teams have actually learned from this list is that ceiling alone isn't a prospect rating. The most successful draft regimes since 2010 — San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Boston — have built around prospects with multi-skill profiles rather than single elite tools. Giannis at #15 in 2013, Curry at #7 in 2009, and Jokić at #41 in 2014 weren't picks that any of the names above could have prevented. They were picks that better evaluation might have caught. The Bennetts and Thabeets of the world are reminders of how often even the most expensive front-office decisions go quietly wrong.

Closing illustration for The Biggest Busts in NBA History