1981 NBA draft

The first two picks in the draft belonged to the teams that finished last in each conference, with the order determined by a coin flip.

[4] The remaining first-round picks and the subsequent rounds were assigned to teams in reverse order of their win–loss record in the previous season.

The Dallas Mavericks used their first pick to draft 1980 Naismith College Player of the Year Mark Aguirre from DePaul University.

The Detroit Pistons used the second overall pick to draft Isiah Thomas, a sophomore guard from Indiana University.

Thomas had just won the 1981 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Championship with Indiana and was named as the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.

[7] Danny Ainge, the 1981 Wooden College Player of the Year, was selected in the second round with the 31st pick by the Boston Celtics.

He reportedly preferred to continue his baseball career, but the Celtics successfully persuaded him to play basketball instead.

[71][72][73][74] In the eighth round, the Golden State Warriors used the 171st pick to selected Yasutaka Okayama, a Japanese basketball player who was measured at 7 feet 8 inches (2.34 m) and 330 pounds (150 kg).

[79] Kenny Easley, a college football star from the University of California, Los Angeles, was selected by the Chicago Bulls with the 216th pick in the 10th round.

Leonel Marquetti would become the first official foreign-born college underclassman to qualify for this rule (in his case, being born Cuban while raised as an American), as previous years only had American-born players that fit the criteria at the time.