The Wizards, frozen in place

Washington is headed toward another mediocre season. What now?

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up; J.M.W. Turner; 1838

Famously, the Washington Wizards have never advanced past the second round of the playoffs. The Washington basketball franchise, then the Bullets, last made the NBA’s Finals Four in 1979, a year after winning the franchise’s only championship. It’s been 43 years since the team won multiple playoff series in one year.

It’s even worse now, though: the Wizards haven’t won a single playoff series since 2017. They returned to the playoffs in 2018 finishing just above .500, but lost in the first round. They haven’t finished above .500 since. There was a single playoff series in there. It didn’t go well.

There seem to be two major problems here. The first is that Bradley Beal has not proven to be a top-tier star on the level of the individual talent on the Eastern Conference’s best teams. That’s not an insult to say that Beal is not on the level of a Giannis, a Tatum, an Embiid, a Durant. But it is reality. There appeared a chance in recent years that Beal could launch to that level — a Devin Booker type level, or maybe an inch better — but it hasn’t happened, due to health and whatever else you want to cite. The Wizards just don’t have the same level of central superstar that better East teams have.

The second issue is that the Wizards have really struggled to find a second star to put alongside Beal since John Wall’s injury woes and eventual exile. The three major attempts were Russell Westbrook, Spencer Dinwiddie and Kristaps Porzingis. Westbrook actually made Beal better by relieving some pressure, but there were obvious flaws and a ceiling there. Dinwiddie’s time in D.C. was a nightmare, by all accounts. Porzingis has been quite good in Washington, but he’s not quite at the level of talent you need to make a competitive duo given Beal’s shortcomings.

There’s also simply the fact that the Wizards are often dealing with player absences. Beal, for example, has missed 10 of Washington’s 28 games. You can’t exactly tie Beal’s absence to Washington’s failures, though: the Wizards are 7-11 (.389) with Beal this season and 4-6 (.400) without him. Washington is -2 points per 100 possessions with him on the court and -2.3 points per 100 possessions with him off the court. The team is just plain old mediocre in every orientation.

Does the roster need a jolt? Like, a real jolt? There have been coaching changes, there have been trades all over the roster, with one exception: Beal. The problem is that Beal is clearly the best asset the Wizards have had over the past decade, so when facing the risk of losing him in free agency, Washington handed Beal a giant contract ($250 million over five years) and a no-trade clause. So not only is Beal now on a contract with real downside risk given his limitations as a player and any potential injury issues, but he can veto whatever trades the Wizards could come up with, should they decide to go that route.

Frankly, it’s really hard to fault the Wizards for any of this. Beal has sometimes looked like a world beater. Those Wall-Beal teams felt like legitimate threats to the LeBronian hegemony in the East — there are a dynamism, a verve, some two-way burst. It was easy to believe even in the face of Wall’s downfall that Beal could keep the Wizards afloat while they sought out a new co-star. The problems with Wall’s contract and a couple of strike-outs prevented that. It was also easy to believe that however bad the post-Wall Wizards looked with Beal, life without him would be even worse.

Now, of course, the calculus looks different. The Wizards are 11-17, No. 12 in the East. Would life without Beal really be worse right now? Hard to say it would be all that different, unless you think that with that quarter-billion dollar contract there’s a team out there ready to send a chest of draft picks to D.C. in exchange for him. Every team above the Wizards in the standings is legitimately better than them, with the possible exception of the Pacers, who may very well be crashing back to Earth and remain a candidate to let the bottom purposely fall out via trading some veterans. (This is not a stray aimed at the Pacers; they are 4-8 in their last 12, and if you had to pick a playoff or play-in team to fall out, they are the obvious choice.) The best the Wizards could realistically hope for now is another play-in bid, if things go right. That’s frankly insulting to Wizards fans.

And yet, Beal’s value is at an all-time low given his contract, his on-court regression and his absences. Even if there were a deal, Beal has veto power. The Wizards are stuck like this until something materially changes, like the bottom completely falls out (unlikely given how bad the worst East teams are, which is why there’s no mention of the Wembanyama sweepstakes here: the Wizards are probably going to be in that 6-8 range barring a complete fire sale) or Beal regains some of the magic he seems to have lost. The latter is a bet worth considering, that once Beal’s injury resolves he’ll come back strong and be a powerful scorer, whether it makes the Wizards better or not. This team isn’t going anywhere or doing anything, it would appear. As such, the best way out of this mediocre statis is to get the players’ values up so you can move on to the next version of the Wizards, one with some hope and a chance to be different.

The Beal era once held promise, but all that has evaporated and there’s no new stream flowing in. Time to replenish it from the outside.