A new NBA season has started, and the Washington Wizards once again find themselves far off the national radar. Even in an age of increasing parity, you would be hard-pressed to find any reliable forecast, computer simulation or hot take that expects the Wizards to challenge even for the Eastern Conference Play-In, let alone qualify outright for the East playoffs. This is what irrelevance looks like.
But there’s reason for hope.
For one of the few times since 1979, when the Washington Bullets repeated as Eastern Conference champs, the organization has a clear plan to become relevant again and also has the infrastructure to avoid the crippling self-inflicted mistakes that have made the franchise the butt of jokes for many of the last 45 years.
There’s a beefed-up front office, with executives who helped construct winning teams. There’s a modern player-development program that incorporates every subdepartment within the Wizards’ basketball operation. They’re “leveling up” everywhere, hiring a chef to go on road trips, building a makeshift practice facility during the Las Vegas Summer League and will soon move forward to identify a site for a brand-new training center in the District.
“When I first came here, there really wasn’t infrastructure,” said forward Kyle Kuzma, who joined the Wizards via a trade in mid-2021. “Everything was on the fly, you know? (Now, there’s) much more of a sense of purpose in that department.”
Build through the draft. Develop all the players on the roster, and provide the resources they need to improve. Stockpile as many future draft picks as possible. Create a professional atmosphere in which everyone is accountable. And, as important as anything else, though never explicitly stated, maximize the odds for the NBA Draft Lottery.
That’s the plan.
And that will provide the backdrop when the Wizards open their regular season Thursday night at Capital One Arena, hosting the defending champion Boston Celtics, as well as for the months ahead.
While teams like the Bucks, Celtics, Cavaliers, Knicks and Magic will measure their success this season on where they are in the top of the standings, The Wizards will measure their success in large part by the growth of 19-year-olds Bub Carrington and Alex Sarr and 20-year-olds Bilal Coulibaly and Kyshawn George. Everyone acknowledges rookies such as Carrington, George and Sarr and second-year players like Coulibaly will encounter growing pains, that they will endure difficult stretches. But if they finish the season better than they are now, that would be a win for the franchise. If they learn how to be solid pros — what their coach and veteran teammates refer to as “building habits” — that would be a win.
All the players have to make individual gains and the team needs to begin developing some identity (apart from playing at a breakneck offensive pace) that they can build on in the years ahead.
So what’s at stake in a season with such low outside expectations?
Coach Brian Keefe’s answer was telling.
“We’re establishing habits on how we want to be acting professionally in our training, in all of our day-to-day stuff,” Keefe said. “I think those things for our organization are going to lead to sustainable winning. Those are the things that we can only tackle one day at a time, and we have to be really intentional about doing that.
“That’s the biggest thing for me: At the end of the year, are we much more established on how we do things here and what we stand for here? I think we’re doing a pretty good job of that. But we have to go through the season and through the fire to keep working on that when it’s not going as well because every team goes through that. The best teams have hard times during the year.”
If that sounds like basic goals — well, they are.
“Some of it is tangible to the outside eye, and some of it is intangible,” swingman Corey Kispert said. “We’ve got to see players make improvements on the floor with their game. We’ve got to see us play with an edge and play with a competitiveness that doesn’t waver by score. But there’s a culture thing, too, that you can sense when you walk in the building or you spend time in the locker room. That needs to continue to improve as well.
“That gets tested in good moments and bad moments, in big wins and big losses. That kind of culture gets tested, and when you can lean on that and rely on that throughout the course of a season, that’s where the good teams kind of separate from the not-so-good teams, and we need to start working on building that culture now. We have been, and I’m happy with how (far) we’ve come. But we’ve got a lot of work left to do in that regard.”
Jordan Poole knows what it takes to win an NBA title. He was an important complementary piece alongside stars Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green when the Golden State Warriors captured the 2021-22 championship.
So what, in his opinion, would make this season a success for the Wizards? What would help the franchise move in the right direction?
“I think just coming in and just showing up every day is the first thing, first and foremost,” Poole answered. “Guys coming in and getting their work in. Find a way to get better, whether it’s on the court, whether it’s in the treatment room, whether it’s lifting. The games are, obviously, going to be real-life experience for us to get better. But just taking advantage of every opportunity and every moment that we have, good or bad, of just being in the gym, just being together as a team (is critical), because it goes such a long way.”
Poole emphasized the need for patience. He’s right. Carrington, George and Sarr will soak up lots of minutes, but they have a grand total of zero NBA regular-season games of experience on their résumés. Even free-agent signee Jonas Valančiūnas, the team’s oldest player at 32, will need time to adjust to new teammates and to Washington’s frenetic style of play on offense.
By conventional measurements at least, it’s going to be a long, tough season.
For Wizards fans, it’s probably not the losses that hurt the most. It’s the perceived derision, disrespect and indifference they see from every corner of the basketball universe, as if to ask, “Why would you care about that team?”
There will be more of that heartache in the months ahead, or maybe even years ahead unless the franchise lucks out in the next draft lottery and wins the opportunity to draft either Cooper Flagg or Ace Bailey.
The truth is, no matter how thorough the front office, coaching staff and players are during the early stages of a rebuild, almost every rebuilding franchise needs some degree of luck along the way.
Even if Washington finishes this season with the league’s worst record, it will enter the lottery with a 48 percent chance of winning the fifth pick in the 2025 draft. The lottery really does come down to dumb luck, and that’s the primary reason why any rebuild is not certain to work.
Rebuilds are filled with risk but also hope. The Wizards’ front office and the team’s principal owner, Ted Leonsis, are willing to endure several years of pain in a quest for a long-term payoff.
(Top photo of Jordan Poole and Dennis Schröder: Gregory Fisher / Imagn Images)
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Josh Robbins is a senior writer for The Athletic. He began covering the Washington Wizards in 2021 after spending more than a decade on the Orlando Magic beat for The Athletic and the Orlando Sentinel, where he worked for 18 years. His work has been honored by the Football Writers Association of America, the Green Eyeshade Awards and the Florida Society of News Editors. He served as president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association from 2014 to 2023. Josh is a native of the greater Washington, D.C., area. Follow Josh on Twitter @JoshuaBRobbins
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Now that the preseason is over, let’s break down how the Wizards did statistically
The preseason is over, and the numbers tell a simple story: the Washington Wizards are doomed. DOOMED, I say.
To “umm...actually” myself, that’s not exactly what the preseason numbers say. I mean, if they meant anything, that’s what they’d be saying, but in truth they don’t mean a lot. More than nothing, less than determinative.
In previous years, stat goobers like ESPN’s Kevin Pelton and 82games’ Roland Beech studied whether there was anything to learn from the NBA preseason. They each found some correlation between a team’s preseason performance and their subsequent regular season record.
Broadly speaking, the correlation was strongest with bad teams from the previous year — bottom dwellers who played well in the preseason tended to go on to make a significant regular season improvement. However, those studies were all from the days when NBA teams played eight preseason games. Nowadays, they play fewer.
The Wizards got five this year. Some teams got six, if they had matchups with the New Zealand Breakers or the Ratiopharm Ulm. Some teams played four games. A few played just three.
Something I learned today: league rules don’t require teams to play any preseason games. Teams are not permitted to play more than six. The scheduling is decentralized. Franchises negotiate directly with each other to select dates and locations for the games.
Anyway, the Wizards are finished with an up-and-down preseason, and there are numbers, so we might as well take a look.
In preseason competition, the Wizards were near the bottom in virtually the statistical categories that meaningfully measure team strength during the regular season and playoffs:
Not good.
As befits one of the league’s weakest preseason teams, very few Wizards players did much more than flash positives on a few plays. No one sustained excellence. Just three players cracked average in my Player Production Average metric, and two of them barely played. The team released one of them and will presumably sign him to the Capital City Go-Go.
Below are some thoughts, observations, and numbers from preseason:
Preseason PPA Scores below...
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This is going to be Year 2 of however long the process takes to turn the Wizards around and build them back into a winner, so while yes, excitement abounds about the basketball on the floor, it could be another tough season when it comes to the standings.
“Our guys have put a lot of work in through the offseason, a lot of training and preparation, so we’re excited for them to get opportunity to go compete against another team,” Keefe said. “The way we approach things is pretty simple: we're learning and preparing how to win, to build something sustainable, so winning matters to us, but we want to do it the way that's gonna build something that's gonna be lasting, that's gonna be sustainable, and done the right way. We can play a style of game that may sneak out wins but won’t lead to something that’s built long-term, so we wanna build a style on both ends of the floor that's gonna be sustainable for playoff basketball. We gotta build that day by day and that's gonna take some time.”
So what is it that they’re building?
“Defense is going to be something that our organization carries and that we wanna hang our hat on; we think those are the things that leads to something that's sustainable,” Keefe said. “And then the offense is gonna be obviously a little bit analytically driven, but it's gonna be ball movement, pace, we shot a good amount of threes last year, so that type of thing. We’ve added some size and versatility to the roster through the draft and free agency, so we have guys who are defensive minded and that's an important characteristic we want for our group.”
Alex Sarr being selected No. 2 is a perfect example of what they’re looking for in building blocks.
“The defensive versatility, his ability to a protect the rim, but also guard on the perimeter and guard multiple guys, that’s our first focus with him,” Keefe said. “His offense is gonna be coming around; he's a good decision maker, he can put the ball on the floor and will eventually be a very good shooter in this league, but the defensive versatility was the thing that stood out. His ability to make a big imprint on that in the game for his size, pretty impressive, obbviously gonna be some learning going on for him as he learns the NBA and guys he's playing against, but that was the thing that stood out.”
Take a listen to Keefe’s entire visit above, as he also discusses Sarr’s evolution this summer, Bilal Coulibaly’s expectations in Year 2 and expectations for some others, and more!
