With the 55th pick in the 2026 NBA Draft, the Los Angeles Clippers selected Northwestern forward Nick Martinelli, further validating Chris Collins’ ability to develop and nurture pro-level talent amidst an ever-evolving college basketball landscape.
Los Angeles came out of nowhere and traded up with the Houston Rockets to pick Martinelli, after initially trading down to pick 57 in a deal with the Atlanta Hawks earlier Wednesday night. The Clippers were not reported to have met with Martinelli in the pre-draft
process, but his resume likely spoke for itself to where LA President Lawrence Frank felt comfortable taking a flyer on the Wildcats legend.
Martinelli leaves Evanston as one of the most decorated scorers in program history. A two-time All-Big Ten selection, he averaged 23.0 points, 6.2 rebounds and 2.0 assists on 51/41.7/80.9 shooting splits in his senior season, winning the Big Ten scoring title for the second straight year and setting a new Northwestern single-season record with 759 points. He is also a two-time First-Team Academic All-American, and one of only three Wildcats in program history to play in four NCAA Tournament games alongside Boo Buie and Brooks Barnhizer.
The pick extends a run of Collins-developed players earning professional opportunities that would have seemed improbable when Northwestern made its first NCAA Tournament appearance in 2017. Barnhizer went to the then-reigning-champion Oklahoma City Thunder at pick 44 in last year’s draft and earned real two-way trust in a system that has come to define what second-round development can look like. Martinelli’s path to Wednesday night was similar in spirit: four years in Evanston, steady improvement at every level, work ethic that draft evaluators rave about and a senior season that made the skeptics run out of arguments.
His selection also made history for the program itself, as Martinelli and Barnhizer are the first Northwestern duo to get selected in consecutive years since the NBA Draft shrank to its current two-round format in 1989.
The most realistic projection for Martinelli heading into Wednesday night was always late in the second round for a team wanting maturity and IQ from day one, intangibles that should prove beneficial for his staying-power in the league. With Los Angeles making that call, they are banking on his foul-drawing ability, interior physicality, his senior-year three-point leap as proof that his shooting can hold at an efficient rate, and the belief that his defensive limitations can be managed in the right system.
His .418 free throw rate was the highest of his career, and he converted at a career-high 80.9% clip, a significant jump from 72.8% as a junior. In a league where getting to the line and making foul shots is as valuable as ever, that translates regardless of role.
He joins the aforementioned Barnhizer, along with Pete Nance and Pat Spencer as former ‘Cats currently active in the association.
Martinelli finished his high school career at Glenbrook South in Glenview, Illinois, with 1,331 points and a spot on the 2022 Associated Press Class 4A First-Team All-State, following in the footsteps of older brother Dominic, an All-State player himself. He arrived at Northwestern as a three-star recruit, played sparingly as a freshman, earned an expanded role as a sophomore, and exploded as a junior, averaging 20.5 points and breaking John Shurna’s single-season scoring record, which he then broke again as a senior.
The arc of that career, from a three-star recruit who barely got recruited to a player hearing his name called at Barclays Center, is the clearest possible argument for what Collins has built at Welsh-Ryan Arena. It is not a program that produces McDonald’s All-Americans or one-and-done lottery picks. It is a program that takes players seriously and makes them better, year over year, until the result speaks for itself. Martinelli is perhaps the loudest version of that result the program has ever produced.
