NBA Draft: 30 Worst No. 1 overall picks in league history (Updated 2023)

30 worst No. 1 overall picks in league history: 1. Gene Melchiorre

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Mark Workman managed to accrue negative win shares while he was in the league, and yet he wasn’t the worst No. 1 overall pick in NBA history? What could be worse than that? Cheating to the point of being banned from the league before ever playing a single minute would do the trick.

Gene Melchiorre was a 5’8″ point guard who played college basketball at Bradley University. The Braves were wildly successful while Melchiorre was there, going 119 – 22 over his four seasons. He was a consensus first-team All-American as a senior in 1951 and was taken first overall by the Baltimore Bullets in that summer’s draft.

Just weeks after the draft, Melchiorre and four of his teammates admitted that they took bribes to “shave points” off the final margin of victory. While their cooperation may have kept them out of jail, they were also kept out of the league. NBA President Maurice Podoloff and the league took a no-tolerance stance on point shaving, and Melchiorre and his teammates were banned from the league for life.

There is no “should have picked” for this category, however, because no one from the 1951 draft made much of an impact in the league. It’s a fitting end to our list; Gene Melchiorre never played an NBA minute because he cheated in college, but it’s hard to even say the Bullets made a mistake drafting him given the other options were largely negative players themselves.

Our list of the 30 worst No. 1 overall picks in league history is a difficult one to read, spanning from All-Stars to scrubs and everything in between. Even with the first pick, it’s possible to go horribly wrong, even if in recent years the hit rate has continued to go up. The pace of Mark Workmans and Dick Ricketts busting out is going down. Whether that’s luck, smarter teams, or both, it means a shift in the draft landscape.

It also means that the players at the top of this list may be stuck here for a very long time.