A draft pick is a team's selection slot in the NBA Draft, an asset that can be used to choose a player or traded to another team.
A draft pick is both an event and a currency. In the draft itself, held each June across two rounds of thirty picks, it is the right to select one eligible player, in an order set by record and the lottery. Between drafts, picks, especially first round picks and the right to swap pick positions, are the league's most liquid trade asset, the unit in which star players are priced.
Pick protection is the term's fine print: a traded pick may be protected, kept by its original team if it lands in a certain range, top four protected and the like, converting to later picks or expiring under conditions deals spell out. Protections have decided franchise futures years after the trades that created them, and the book of famous pick debts, above all the stepien era and the rule named for it limiting trading picks in consecutive years, is transaction folklore.
Historically, every player on the other shelves of this site arrived through a draft pick or its absence: first overall selections, the famous steals taken forty first, and the undrafted exceptions. Quiz questions use draft pick in both senses freely, as the slot a legend was taken with and as the asset a contender mortgaged to win now.
In use"They traded two future first round draft picks to land the star."