Through roughly the first quarter of the 2024-25 NBA season, the Washington Wizards are historically awful. They are 2-17, riding a 15-game losing streak. Their roster is a mess, with no cornerstones to build around and all kinds of players who don’t fit. Their best hope, as it currently stands, is to win the 2025 NBA Draft lottery and the opportunity to select Cooper Flagg. Which, assuming they end the season with the league’s worst record, they still have only a 14 percent chance of achieving.
What went so horribly wrong for Washington? For a simple answer, everything. After going 15-67 a season ago, the Wizards were expected to be slightly improved in year two of their rebuild, if only for the fact that it’s hard to get a whole lot worse than they were last year. They managed to do exactly that, though, because they had an absolutely miserable offseason.
They traded away Deni Avdija, who had finally begun to show significant signs of improvement with a career-best 2023-24 season, and received nothing of much value in return. Then, they drafted Alexandre Sarr with the second-overall pick, a modern-day big man who wowed scouts with his physical measurables a la Victor Wembanyama, but to say he’s a project would be an understatement.
Sarr, who stands at seven feet tall, is shooting 37.7 percent from the floor this season and averages only 6.2 rebounds. He’s a solid rim protector, but banking on a player like him to develop his offensive game is always a massive risk. The Wizards have another rookie, Bub Carrington (drafted with one of the picks they received for Avdija) who has impressed with his opportunities, but he’s now been forced to take a backseat to veteran Malcolm Brogdon on the depth chart.
Brogdon is one of several Wizards players — see also Jonas Valanciunas and most notably Kyle Kuzma — who are laughably out of place on a rebuilding roster. They have no upside and are being forced into the wrong roles, and the progress of Washington’s young core is being stunted as a result.
Really, though, where the Wizards screwed up was by putting themselves in this rebuilding situation to begin with. Every team in the NBA now, once it deems that its competitive window has plateaued, has decided the road forward must involve first taking a massive step back. Following the “success” (zero Eastern Conference Finals appearances) of the “Process” Philadelphia 76ers, teams are blowing everything up and deliberately tanking for years on end in hopes that some of those shiny draft picks can eventually take them to the promised land. Spoiler alert: they don’t.
Far more often than not, tanking only leaves teams worse off than before. Even the exceptions to the rule require savvy asset management as opposed to simply throwing darts at the wall and hoping they stick. The biggest reason for the Oklahoma City Thunder’s recent success is because they received Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at the start of their rebuild, who they developed into a superstar. The Houston Rockets were bad for a few years but rebounded after signing Fred VanVleet and Dillon Brooks as free agents, while the face of their future is arguably not Jalen Green, the second-overall pick in 2021, but rather Alperen Sengun, taken 16th that same draft.
It’s been shown time and time again that the draft is a crapshoot, and any team’s best bet is to maximize its proven positive assets. Two years ago Washington had such assets in Bradley Beal and Kristaps Porzingis, and while the Wizards may not have been winning the NBA Finals anytime soon with them, they were at least treading water. If the organization deemed it was time to move on from them, then the solution should have been to turn them into pieces of similar value — not total mystery boxes. Washington did make out nicely by acquiring Jordan Poole in the deal for Beal, but aside from him, it’s been a total commitment to losing.
This is the result. There is no player on the Wizards’ current roster who is likely to ever be a star on a playoff-level team, and there’s no guarantee they’ll be drafting one anytime soon. Worse yet, the more they lose, and the more they attempt to rationalize that the losing will be worth it one day, the more it instills a losing culture. Players will stall out in their development because they have no structure around them, and will eventually be shipped out for the next shiny draft pick. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Unless you are one of a select few franchises such as the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, or New York Knicks that can attract big names whenever they please, this is what tanking accomplishes: a perpetual cycle of losing, losing, and more losing. It’s how mediocre teams become bad, and how bad teams become awful. The Wizards had a mediocre team with assets that could’ve been used to help them become better, but instead they decided they would rather mortgage everything on a future that can’t be guaranteed. Now, they’re the worst team in the NBA.
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