PMs See BYU’s AJ Dybantsa as the Wizards’ Choice with #1 Pick

The 80th NBA Draft is here, and the 2026 edition offers a laundry list of talent. The lucky Memphis Grizzlies have two picks in Round 1 (#3, #16) as do the Chicago Bulls (#4, #15), the Atlanta Hawks (#8, #23), and the Dallas Mavericks (#9, #30). And all four really need two picks.

With standout 2025 NBA rookies like Matas Buzelis (Bulls), Zaccharie Risacher (Hawks), Zach Edey, and Jaylen Wells (Grizzlies), and 2026 stars like #1 overall pick and NBA Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg (Mavericks), expect Memphis, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas to be on the upswing.​

With no teams forfeiting any picks, the 2026 NBA Draft will see 60 picks made overall in 2 rounds from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY on Tuesday, June 23 and Wednesday, June 24 (ESPN, ABC, 8 ET/7 CT/5 PT). Expect a special buzz with the Knicks winning their first title since 1973.

The Wizards won the NBA Draft Lottery and the #1 pick, and most hoops experts see athletic BYU F AJ Dybantsa (25.5 PPG, 6.8 RPG) as their likely pick, as do traders in the major prediction markets, with Kalshi giving him a 79% chance of going #1 with rivals Polymarket at 80%.

The 6-foot-9-inch and Big 12 Rookie of the Year Dybantsa led the nation in scoring (DI) as a Freshman and helped the Cougars basketball program return to some notoriety, but few Freshmen (basketball players) stay in school these crazy days, even in the age of NIL money.​

Kansas Guard Darryn Peterson is the only other player the Wizards may take at #1, but Dybantsa is a generational talent, and Peterson didn’t play when he didn’t want to for the Jayhawks this past season, sending mixed signals that he is more of a “me” guy than a true team player.​

The Utah Jazz pick #2, and it would be a romantic notion to see Dybantsa fall to #2 and stay in the Beehive State to continue hooping it up for the Mormons and the Mountains, but this is the real world, not some AI-generated version of Reality created by codewriters in neon pink Crocs.​

With Cameron Boozer (Duke), Caleb Wilson (NC), Darius Acuff (ARK), Mikel Brown Jr (LOU), Keaton Wagler (ILL), Kingston Flemings (HOU), Brayden Burries (AZ), Nate Ament (TENN), and Aday Mara and Yaxel Lendborg (MICH), Memphis and Chicago should both get two great picks.

The Washington Wizards have the #1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft and will more than likely use it on the BYU sensation who can score, rebound, and pass, and who would be the face of the Wizards franchise for the next decade, a sorely needed star on a team whose last star was Michael Jordan?​

If the Wizards want, they can trade the #1 pick, but drafts like this are few and far between, and guys like Dybantsa are rare like snow leopards. Will Dawkins is Washington’s GM, and he won’t want to be remembered as the guy who passed on picking Dybantsa #1 to take Darryn Peterson.​​

That raises the big question for those traders possibly interested in buying into the 2026 NBA Draft First-Pick market. Is buying Dybantsa ‘Yes’ at 79¢ too expensive and/or too late? Or is buying Peterson ‘No’ at two pennies more (81¢) just as wise? No. A penny is a penny.​

At 79%, AJ Dybantsa is still the traders’ overwhelming choice to go at #1, with Darryn Peterson (20%), Cameron Boozer (2.2%)—son of former Duke and NBA standout Carlos Boozer—and Caleb Wilson (<1%) following at Polymarket as Division I college players from the US dominated.​

🏀2026 NBA Draft #1 Pick Pick: AJ Dybantsa, Yes 78¢ (Kalshi)​​

Click here to trade on the 2026 NBA Draft: 1st Overall Pick at Polymarket

Besides trading (and betting) on who might be the #1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft, users at prediction markets and sportsbooks can get down on other things like who will be picks #2 to #20, What Team Will Draft AJ Dybantsa, and who will be drafted in the Top 3, Top 5, and Top 10, etc.​

Freshly baked from the ovens at Kalshi, here are the links for the #1 through #12 picks and who was leading in these specific markets on June 21, two days out from the draft in the Big Apple:​

The Pros may hate it, and the Joes may love it, but no matter what your take is on the Elon Musk SpaceX (SPCX) IPO on the NASDAQ on Friday, June 12, you have to be impressed with all of the records set as the quirky rocket man took his little rocket company public in the Big Apple.​

The SpaceX initial public offering sold 556 million shares and raised a record $75 billion at a share price of $135 each as both institutional and retail investors grabbed a piece of the pie for the company that wants to go to the Red Planet someday. That’s an initial valuation of $1.77 trillion.​

And while we’re talking trillions—a thousand billions—Musk officially became the world’s first trillionaire with the monster SpaceX IPO, a terrifying concept to some. This is a trillion typed: $1,000,000,000,000. Twelve zeroes. Will Musk need to order longer checks? We giggle as Poors.​​

Musk made stock market history, and now, with a net worth of $1.1 trillion, he likely raised the bar so high that no IPO will ever have a higher valuation. Google’s Larry Page has $294.1 billion, so 54-year-old Musk is indeed a man alone on Money Mountain.​

SpaceX shares opened up trading 11% higher than the IPO price of $135 at $168 (+24.4%), and closed at $161.11 on the historic day where Musk—also involved in Tesla, X (Twitter), Neuralink, xAI, and the Boring Company—rang the opening bell remotely from SpaceX in Starbase, Texas.​

On the tech-heavy NASDAQ, retail investors gobbled up a record $93.8 million of SpaceX as the debut passed Saudi Aramco’s raising $25.6 billion on the Saudi Exchange (Tadawul) in December 2019, seven years after Musk’s SpaceX was created in a small warehouse in El Segundo, California.​​

After the dust settled, SpaceX had the 6th-largest market cap of publicly traded companies in the United States, ahead of Broadcom ($1.81 trillion). Amazon is at $2.54 trillion for context. SpaceX is also worth $700 billion more than one of Musk’s other babies, Tesla (TSLA: NASDAQ).

Wondering what comes after a trillionaire? It’s a quadrillionaire. Fifteen zeroes — and even scarier, typed out — than a trillion, a quadrillion—not a zillion—is: $1,000,000,000,000,000. This is as long as my pinky. No numbers should be longer than fingers. But Elon Musk has somehow done it.

He launched the world’s largest IPO and became the world’s first trillionaire on a not-so-calm Friday morning. What happens down the road remains to be seen, but it’s hard to see both institutional and retail investors not wanting this one in their portfolios after all they’ve witnessed.​

In an effort to curb potential future insider trading and foster sorely needed integrity in this still-evolving industry, the popular prediction market exchange Kalshi announced last week that it will require users to provide employment information in certain markets.​

Only markets deemed higher-risk candidates will require this type of scrutiny, but it is sorely needed after we saw a Google employee make a bunch of money (more than $1.2 million) through insider trading using information he knew from his job, trading on Polymarket.​

Had Polymarket known that Michele Spagnuolo—using the alias “AlphaRaccoon”—was a longtime software engineer at Google and probably shouldn’t be dabbling (cheating) on its PM exchange, then maybe we wouldn’t know the name Michele Spagnuolo and wonder if it’s a man or a woman.​

Well, Michele is a “he,” and he was accused of using confidential information to try to profit from the Google Year in Search data market on Polymarket, and Kalshi wants to make sure things like this don’t happen to them.​

Anyone subject to this requirement will be asked to fill out an online form from Kalshi, which could block traders from making some trades based on their employer or the information involved. This is like the Know Your Customers (KYC) compliance used by casinos.​

Gambling industry analyst Brad Allen posted an interesting chart on his Twitter (X) feed (@BradAllenNFL) from Ed Young at the brokerage firm Morgan Stanley, showing that the prediction market Kalshi may now have as much as 10% of the total sports betting market.

Flutter Entertainment’s (LSE: FLUT) FanDuel has been #1 in market share—betting Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR)—in the sports betting marketplace, with around 44%, with rival DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) at #2 with around 34% as the duopoly continues dominating the space for now.

FanDuel and DraftKings make up a reported 78% of all GGR. The joint venture between MGM Resorts (NYSE: MGM) and Entain (LSE: ENT), BetMGM, still ranks #3 with a respectable 14%, according to SportbotAI. If Kalshi is around 10% or 11%, then the future will be fucking crazy.

Why? Because it’s already crazy with the CFTC proclaiming it’s a regulatory God, some US states not wanting God telling them what to do, and the Supreme Court probably having to get involved someday to say what’s what, what’s legal, and what we—all 50 states—can do. We wait. As always.

Muddy waters aren’t great for fishing. And too much regulation, fees, and taxation may make fishermen into farmers. Then what? This will take time, but with things moving fast and so many wanting pieces of what they see as an easy pie, we’ll see failures as we saw with the Offshores.

The future may be crowded with FanDuel, DraftKings, and their offshoots, along with Kalshi, Polymarket, and others like Underdog, ProphetX, Robinhood, Limitless, and Novig. Call it a prediction market supercycle, and with estimates of $1 trillion volume by 2030, it’s hard to argue.

We will look back in 5 to 10 years and see that not everyone survived this ongoing fight for the ever-increasing dollars of sports bettors and prediction market traders. There is definitely room for both, but some moral and technical issues really need to be cleaned up before the mud clears.

When we intake so many words and numbers in The Digital Age—now muddled by AI and over-hype—it’s easy not to make time to try to understand that quite often what we see, hear, and perceive to be simple truths are not really truths at all, but what we choose to settle for.​

Think about it if you can spare the Time. And Time is everything. Ask a dead man. As Pink Floyd sang perfectly in their song Sheep, “Now things are really what they seem, no, this is no bad dream.” We see 99%, but it isn’t 100%. And we see “peace,” but in the end, all we see is war. What gives?

What gives is that Bullshit and Hype have become such a big part of “the norm” now that we all seem to gloss over the real Truth(s) buried somewhere beneath all the bullshit. The trading volumes reported by Polymarket often fall into this nebulous non-real statistical category.

And traders also use VPNs to trade in countries they do not actually live in. Rumor had it Polymarket was starting to block VPNs in countries on top of geoblocking nations, but with so much money residing in Europe and the US, it makes no sense to bite the hand(s) that feed you.​

And the perception that some of these smaller prediction markets will ever be able to swim with the big fish is also not what it seems. Ten years from now, we’ll look back and laugh at their names and ask, “How could they have entered the space?” much like the Offshore rush two decades ago.​

The 2026 FIFA World Cup continues play today (Tuesday) with four fixtures, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal facing Uzbekistan (1 ET/10 PT), followed by England vs Ghana (4 ET/1 PT), then Panama vs Croatia (7 ET/4 PT), with Colombia vs Congo DR wrapping things up (10 ET/7 PT).

This is a matchday where we may see all four favorites—CR7 and Portugal, Harry Kane and England, Luka Modrić and Croatia, and James Rodríguez and Colombia—should prevail. At Kalshi, the Three Lions of England are big favorites (75%) over Ghana (10%), with a Draw sitting at 17%.​

England (11%), Portugal (10%), and the Coffee Growers of Colombia (2%) are all being given a decent chance of winning the WC, but sentiment for Colombia has faded somewhat. Nations from Europe (12) and South America (10) have won all 22 World Cups played to date.​​

Looking at the FIFA H2H rankings from Tuesday’s action, we see why backing the chalk is the Rx. England was #4 with Ghana down at #73. Portugal was #5 against #51 Uzbekistan; Croatia was #11 against #34 Panama; and Colombia was #14 against Ghana, ranked #73.​

These are all huge gaps, and these are the types of games teams ranked in the top 15 find a way to usually score first, control the pace of the match, and get all 3 points before the Knockout Stage really separates the Men from the Boys. All four could win by 2 goals on this particular day.​

⚽Tuesday World Cup 4-Side Parlay Pick: Portugal—England—Croatia—Colombia​

Click here to trade on the England vs Ghana World Cup match at Kalshi

The World Cup resumes on Wednesday with six games, including Bosnia-Herzegovina vs Qatar and Switzerland vs Canada opening (3 ET/12 PT), followed by Morocco vs Haiti and Scotland vs Brazil (6 ET/3 PT), and ending with Czechia vs Mexico and South Africa vs South Korea (9 ET/6 PT).​

The three best games of the session are in Vancouver (SUI-CAN), Miami Gardens (SCO-BRA), and Mexico City (CZE-MEX), where traders give Mexico a 51% chance of winning in 90 minutes plus Injury Time, with Czechia at 26%, and a Draw trading at 24% at the Dolphins’ NFL stadium.​

Mexico shut out South Africa, 2-0, in its group and WC opener, while Czechia lost to South Korea, 2-1, so both Bafana Bafana and Repre started off Group A play on the wrong foot. Canada and Switzerland were both expected to win their openers, but had to settle for Draws.​​

➤Trading Thoughts: The match to focus on here to make some butter is South Korea vs South Africa nightcap from Estadio BBVA (GrassMaster)—dubbed Monterrey Stadium for the WC— in Guadalupe, Mexico, as the CAF side looked very weak and uninspired vs Mexico in the lidlifter.​

South Korea rallied to top a game Czechia side, and the thought here is that the Tigers of Asia will bite early and give the proud AFC confederation a country, along with Japan, to root for in this WC. KFA had won 3 straight matches (8 GF-1 GA) before facing Mexico on June 18 in Provo, Utah.​

With Son Heung-min (LAFC; 145 caps, 39 goals), Hwang Hee-chan (Wolves, 80/17), and rising star Bae Jun-ho (13/2), South Korea should win this one 2-0 or maybe worse if South Africa feels its WC may be coming to an end. When SpaceX finally gets there, they will find no Vuvuzelas on Mars.​

⚽Wednesday World Cup 3-Side Parlay Pick: Morocco—Brazil—South Korea

⚽Wednesday World Cup Straight Side Picks: South Korea, Yes 61¢, South Korea -1.5, Yes 35¢

Click here to trade on the Czechia vs Mexico World Cup match at Kalshi

On the FIFA World Cup schedule for Thursday, June 25, we see six games, including Curaçao playing Ivory Coast and Ecuador playing Germany (4 ET/1 PT), Japan meeting Sweden and Tunisia vs Netherlands (7 ET/4 PT), and Paraguay vs Australia and the USMNT vs Türkiye (10 ET/7 PT).​

We will handicap the pivotal Group D fixture between the USMNT and Türkiye below.​

The Germany vs Ecuador game at MetLife Stadium (FieldTurf CORE) in East Rutherford, NJ, is massive in Group E, and traders at Kalshi have Germany as favorites (51%) vs Enner Valencia and Ecuador (27%) with a Draw at 24% (FOX, FOX ONE, PEACOCK, TELEMUNDO, 4 ET/3 CT/1 PT).​​

➤Trading Thoughts: Ivory Coast should spank Curaçao at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia to start the day, and the Netherlands looks like a good pick over Tunisia at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium (Northbridge Bermudagrass) in Kansas City, Missouri, later in the day.​

Arrowhead has been renamed Kansas City Stadium for the WC, but no one cares, and we still don’t know who GEHA is. Germany, Ecuador, and Japan vs Sweden should be closely contested and are too close to call. Australia looked confident and creative in its opener, while Paraguay scuffled.​

⚽Thursday World Cup 3-Side Parlay Pick: Ivory Coast—Netherlands—Australia​

Click here to read our special World Cup 2026 edition of The Prediction Report

Christian Pulisic and the USMNT will wrap up Group Stage play in the 2026 FIFA World Cup on Thursday, facing Türkiye in the final Group D game for both from SoFi Stadium (Matrix Turf) in Inglewood, California (FOX, FOX ONE, PEACOCK, TELEMUNDO, FUBO, 10 ET/9 CT/7 PT).​

The USA looked fluid in a 4-1 win over Paraguay on June 12 as Folarin Balogun (-375 to be US Top Scorer, DraftKings Predictions) had a brace for The Stars and Stripes, and Giovanni Reyna (8/1) added a goal. Türkiye was upset by Australia, 2-0, making things hard.

At Robinhood Predictions, the USMNT were trading at 49¢, with Hakan Çalhanoğlu (Inter Milan) at 28¢ and a Draw at 23¢. The latest FIFA rankings have the USA at #15—second of all CONCACAF nations behind Mexico (#13)—with Turkey at #27.​

➤Trading Thoughts: Looking at the last 4 meetings (3 Friendlies, 1 Confederations Cup) between these two, we see Türkiye (LWWWWD) and Timothy Weah (12/1, USMNT Top Scorer) and the United States (WLWWL) playing only 2-1 games with both countries winning twice (2-0-2).

That means the Both Teams To Score (‘Yes’) is logical as Ay-Yıldızlılar (The Crescent-Stars) will be desperate to score, and means the USA may benefit on the counter with guys like Captain America, Balogun, Ricardo Pepi, Weah, Freeman, Weston McKennie, and Sebastian Berhalter.

⚽Thursday USMNT-Türkiye Match Pick: USMNT 52¢​

Click here to trade on the USA vs Turkey World Cup match at Robinhood

On the first Friday of the summer of 2026, the FIFA World Cup serves up a six-pack with Norway facing France and Senegal meeting Iraq (3 ET/12 PT), Cape Verde playing Saudi Arabia and Uruguay vs Spain (8 ET/5 PT), and Egypt facing Iran and New Zealand vs Belgium (11 ET/8 PT).​

At Kalshi, Michael Olise (Bayern Munich) and France are favorites (56%) vs Erling Haaland (MCFC) and Norway (22%), with a Draw at 25% in this huge Group I game from Gillette Stadium (FieldTurf CORE) in Foxborough (FOX, FOX ONE, PEACOCK, TELEMUNDO, FUBO, 3 ET/2 CT/12 PT).​

In the day’s other spotlight fixture, Spain are 59% favorites over Uruguay (17%) with a Draw at 24% in their pivotal Group H meeting from Hard Rock Stadium (Tifway 419 Bermuda Grass) in Miami Gardens, Florida (FOX, FOX ONE, PEACOCK, TELEMUNDO, FUBO, 8 ET/7 CT/5 PT).​​

➤Trading Thoughts: France-Norway should see 3 goals, and Belgium should beat the Kiwis on Friday, but this is a hard day to handicap. If Norway can upset WC co-faves France and Uruguay knock off the other co-faves, Spain, the tournament will be turned on its edge just 5 days in.​

But Spain (#2, FIFA Ranking), with the jitterbug Lamine Yamal, Mikel Oyarzabal, Ferran Torres, Modri, and Pedri, La Roja (The Red One) will probably win 2-0 or 2-1 over La Celeste (The Sky Blue), which may not be as strong as previous versions (#16).​

With big man Haaland (6-5, 205), Norway will have a chance vs Les Blues, but France is absolutely loaded and can get goals from so many players, while the Røde, Hvite, Blå (Red, White and Blue) will rely on just one. I saw a video with a big-ass Spider in a pit with Ants. The Ants won in the end.​

⚽Friday World Cup 3-Side Parlay Pick (UEFA Troika): France—Spain—Belgium​​

Click here to trade on the France vs Norway World Cup match at Kalshi

 ➠ In the next issue of The Prediction Report, we’ll zero in on the Knockout Stage of the 2026 World Cup, the Kentucky AG filing three lawsuits, when will the Polymarket TGE drop, and dish up previews of the WC Golden Glove winner and the F1 Lenovo Austrian Grand Prix.