Five words, spoken three years ago, continue to keep the Wizards in suspended animation.
“We will never, ever tank,” Ted Leonsis said in London on Jan. 18, 2019, when his Wizards were just a couple of games out of the final playoff spot in the East.
Exactly a year after that, on Jan. 18, 2020, the Wizards were five games out of the final playoff spot in the East.
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Exactly a year after that, on Jan. 18, 2021, the Wizards were a game and a half out of the final playoff spot in the East.
And exactly a year after that — last month — the Wizards held the eighth playoff spot in the East, a game and a half ahead of the 11th-place Knicks.
Never, ever tanking should produce better results than one Play-In Tournament appearance in three-plus seasons.
Washington again appears to be entering a period of limbo after Tuesday’s announcement that Bradley Beal will miss the rest of the season with a wrist injury that requires surgery. This freezes Beal in place, essentially until this summer, when he’ll have to decide whether to take the Wizards’ supermax offer of $242 million — which the team, by all accounts, is still planning to make.
There was little sign the Wizards were even listening to trade offers for Beal. But now, Wizards president and general manager Tommy Sheppard has to make something else big happen before Thursday’s deadline, without much straw to spin into gold. The team can probably move the expiring contracts of Montrezl Harrell or Thomas Bryant, but they’re not likely to bring back much in return.
Beal has pushed — publicly when he could, privately if he’s had to — for improvements to the roster before he signs away the rest of his prime. And what looked like a steal of a trade over the summer has deteriorated into a muddle at the deadline. Kyle Kuzma has exceeded expectations; Harrell has lived up to his lunch-pail reputation. But the “3” part of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope’s 3-and-D game has gone missing for long stretches, and Spencer Dinwiddie just hasn’t looked like the same guy who showed such promise pre-injury in Brooklyn.
Dinwiddie has played better without Beal on the floor. He will now get two-plus months of Beal-free ball to show whether he should be part of the future in Washington.
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There hasn’t been significant interest in Dinwiddie on the trade market, at any rate. And dealing Kuzma, 26 and under a reasonable contract through 2023, would be crazy.
Perhaps combining Rui Hachimura and Deni Avdija could bring in a young wing, but who’s even available? The Pistons’ Jerami Grant? He’d help some, to be sure, but he’s going to be expensive to keep. (He’s reportedly looking for a four-year extension in excess of $110 million.) And Washington’s inability to add first-round picks until it conveys its owed future first to Oklahoma City (through Houston) from the Russell Westbrook-John Wall deal hamstrings most of the Wizards’ flexibility to sweeten the pot.
But even if the Wiz were able to get Grant, would he make a Beal-less Washington a playoff team? And if the Wizards continue their free fall into a high lottery pick, would Beal be cool waiting for a precocious teenager to make an impact?
If Beal does take the bag next summer, Washington’s locked into a roster with him as its best player for the foreseeable future, with almost no chance to add difference makers through trades. We’ve all seen how most supermaxes have worked out the past few years.
If it sounds like the Wizards don’t have a lot of great options, that’s because they don’t. And that’s what Leonsis’ refusal to tear it down and start over means.
I established my position on this long ago. The Wizards could have traded Beal to a contender in either the summer of 2019 or 2020 and gotten back a monster haul of young players and draft picks. There’s no guarantee they would have gotten any of the likes of a Ja Morant, an Anthony Edwards or a LaMelo Ball had they had all those picks in hand, but they would’ve had a much better chance. And now those small markets in Memphis, Minnesota and Charlotte have bright, exciting futures, with emerging teams built around young stars.
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The Wizards instead opted to try and build a team around Beal that would max out his skills while still putting fans in the seats. No one certainly foresaw the damage COVID-19 would do to gates around the NBA, which meant empty buildings and drastically reduced revenues for Leonsis. But there’s always disaster around the next bend. That would have been the point of taking the team down to the studs and engaging in a full rebuild: greater flexibility in case of a catastrophic injury to a singular star player.
But they didn’t.
And now they can’t. Or, they won’t.
Washington will have no leverage with other teams this summer. So what would be the point of trading Beal then for pennies on the dollar? There’s no team that will have cap room this summer and be at all appealing to the three-time All-Star. Beal should be back in three to six months, if the recovery times of players with similar injuries — like the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown, who suffered a similar injury last season — are any indication. So he could be back in time for training camp. The only thing that really makes sense now is to give Beal the max and see if Sheppard can find more gems among the dross and locate another star.
If this were, say, Oklahoma City, maybe you could argue for unending patience. The Thunder never won a title with Kevin Durant, Westbrook and James Harden, but they were an elite title contender for a half-dozen years. The Rockets didn’t win a ring with Harden as their superstar, but they had the fifth-most wins in the league over a decade. The Spurs are, of course, the Spurs, with two decades’ worth of excellence to keep them warm as they slowly rebuild. They all can reasonably ask their fans to wait while they start over.
Washington hasn’t been in an NBA Finals since 1979.
Washington hasn’t made a conference finals since 1979.
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Washington hasn’t won 50 games in a regular season since 1979.
The most patient, unfulfilled, ridiculously loyal fan base in the NBA shouldn’t be asked to wait, not another second, to begin the pursuit of building a team capable of competing at the top of the league and competing for a championship. Fans have waited four decades. And the wait will continue, because of five words uttered three years ago.
(Photo of Ted Leonsis and Bradley Beal: Greg Fiume / Getty Images)
