CHICAGO – Three franchises won big in the NBA Draft Lottery on Tuesday night in the fourth-floor ballroom at the Palmer House Hilton.

The Phoenix Suns won big. The team with the best odds to get the No. 1 overall pick in the 2018 draft ending up winning the No. 1 overall pick in the 2018 draft. It should be a franchise-changing moment, whether they take big man DeAndre Ayton, who played his high school ball in Phoenix and his collegiate season just down the road in Tucson, or Luka Doncic, whose coach for the Slovenian national team was none other than newly minted Suns coach Igor Kokoskov, or the Duke phenom Marvin Bagley, who has strangely been omitted from most discussions about the No. 1 pick.

The Sacramento Kings won big. The Kings jumped five other franchises to grab the second overall pick, which could put them in position to take an all-around stud like Doncic to put alongside the electric De'Aaron Fox and shooters like Bogdan Bogdanovic and Buddy Hield, or one of the many talented big men in this draft: Ayton if he slips, or Michigan State's Jaren Jackson Jr., or Texas' Mohamed Bamba. Suddenly, the Kings feel like a team that actually has some intriguing long-term pieces and a coherent plan moving forward.

The Atlanta Hawks won big, too, jumping from the fourth-best odds to get the No. 1 pick into landing the No. 3 pick. In a way, the Hawks have the easiest pick in this draft. There's a top tier of three in my mind: Ayton, Doncic, and Bagley. The Hawks get to pick the one who falls to them. Or if you're blown away in workouts with one of the five other potential franchise-changers in this draft – Jackson, Bamba, Missouri's Michael Porter Jr., Alabama's Collin Sexton or, yes, Oklahoma's Trae Young – then go for it.

But you know who lost out?

The Memphis Grizzlies.

Sure, the Grizzlies have the fourth pick in a draft that I just said has eight potential franchise-changers. But only the top three feel like a sure thing: Ayton, Doncic and Bagley. (If you want to throw Jackson into that mix, I won't complain, much.) The Grizz had the second-worst record in the NBA this year, an absolute disaster of a season that saw a devastating injury to point guard Mike Conley and enough drama between franchise cornerstone Marc Gasol and coach David Fizdale that Fizdale eventually got fired. They were exactly one game better than the team with the worst record, the Suns.

If the top three in this draft turn into true superstars in this league, but if whomever the Grizz draft at No. 4  does not, we can point to the week of March 26 as one of the worst weeks in franchise history.

That week, the Grizzlies went on a little two-game winning streak by beating two teams they had no right to beat: The Minnesota Timberwolves on the road, then the Portland Trail Blazers at home. At the time, those losses seemed like potential disasters for the Timberwolves and the Trail Blazers; the Wolves were battling for the final playoff spot, and the Trail Blazers were jostling for better positioning in the playoffs. Those losses could have knocked the Trail Blazers back in the playoff race, and could have knocked the Wolves out of the playoffs altogether.

But it could turn out those games, which seemed like meaningless wins for the Grizzlies at the time, could have far-reaching negative implications for the Grizzlies.

If the Grizzlies had lost those two games, they would have had the worst record in the NBA, the best chance of getting the No. 1 pick – and nearly a two in three chance at getting a top three pick. But losing those two games meant the Grizzlies, instead of having 250 of the 1,000 ping pong balls in the lottery, ended up having fewer than 200. Those extra 50-plus ping pong balls could have made the difference between the No. 1 overall pick and the No. 4 overall pick.

The NBA Draft is always a crapshoot, like any draft. No. 1 overall picks can turn into busts, like Anthony Bennett; No. 13 picks can turn into immediate superstars, like Donovan Mitchell. The Grizzlies could certainly still get a superstar at No. 4.

But in a draft where the top three feel like sure things, those two wins in March could end up haunting the Grizzlies for many, many years.