Roadmap for a Rebuild: How, and how fast, can the Wizards improve their deficient roster? (2024)

The Washington Wizards bear a unique debt to their fan base.

Among NBA franchises founded before 2000, Washington is the only team that hasn’t recorded a single 50-win regular season in the last four-plus decades.

Washington hasn’t won 50 games in a season since 1978-79, the year after the then-Bullets won their only NBA championship. Since then, 14 different franchises, slightly less than half of the league, have won at least one title, and every other team (except the current Charlotte Hornets, who started play in 2004-05 as the Charlotte Bobcats) has reached at least one conference final. In fact, more than half of the NBA’s teams — 17 — have made five or more conference finals during that stretch.

Fans in D.C. have waited longer than any other fan base in the league for a team that both wins at a consistently high level and has a real chance to contend. Many franchises have built, rebuilt and re-rebuilt contenders during that stretch, while Washington has meandered from decade to decade, never achieving anything approaching leaguewide relevance.

Occasionally, a superstar has come through the District — Chris Webber, Gilbert Arenas, John Wall — and, briefly, raised expectations. But it’s never been sustainable.

The Wizards’ new brain trust has been empowered by team governor Ted Leonsis to do whatever it takes to, finally, put the franchise on a true contender footing. The new front office is attempting to do just that, with a comprehensive rebuild of the franchise from the bottom up. The Athletic is examining the myriad changes in philosophy, personnel and infrastructure that the Wizards are making as they try, at long last, to remake the NBA’s most forlorn franchise.

Part I: How the Wizards are emphasizing “small wins.”
Part II: How the Wizards are “leveling up” off the court.

WASHINGTON — Here’s the good news for Washington Wizards fans who’ve suffered through the team’s horrendous start to the 2023-24 season: Things almost certainly won’t improve anytime soon.

Perhaps that sounds counterintuitive, even contradictory. But in the NBA it isn’t.

After decades of chasing regular-season wins in hopes of sneaking into the playoffs, instead of building a championship-level infrastructure, the organization has finally committed itself to building slowly, often painstakingly, through the draft and player development as it puts people and practices into place that, down the road, may persuade any homegrown stars to stay long term — and entice established stars to consider the franchise as a free-agent or trade destination.

The Wizards’ win-loss record, for the next several years, will matter in only one sense: maximizing the franchise’s NBA Draft Lottery odds.

And that almost certainly means absorbing more losses, on top of this season’s terrible start.

In the short term, that is beyond painful. The Wizards, as detailed throughout this series, have been awful on the court this season — less competitive than team officials expected, and hoped for, when training camp opened. The roster put together is one of the worst defensive and rebounding teams in the league. And this comes on the heels of decades of precious few moments when Washington put good, competitive teams on the court. Losing is corrosive, to players and fans.

But this is what a large swath of the team’s fan base said it wanted: a complete overhaul, a rebuild that concentrated on building through the draft and developing young players, including players from the Wizards’ G League affiliate, the Capital City Go-Go. Many fans have not been satisfied with recent Wizards teams that, at their best, with Bradley Beal as their centerpiece, served as playoff fodder for better teams.

Those fans said they didn’t want the Wizards to continue to make short-term trades for good-but-hardly-great veterans who could steal a few more regular-season wins every year but weren’t talented enough to lead a deep postseason run.

Going this route means taking a lot more L’s in the foreseeable future — and, most likely, more drubbings similar to the 136-108 loss at home to the Atlanta Hawks on Nov. 25 and the 142-122 defeat, also at home, to the New Orleans Pelicans last Wednesday.

Ted Leonsis, the CEO and principal owner of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, said he committed to this direction when he fired Tommy Sheppard as Wizards president and general manager last spring. In hiring Michael Winger as president of Monumental Basketball, and Winger subsequently hiring Will Dawkins as the Wizards’ general manager and Travis Schlenk as senior vice president of player personnel, the Wizards now have three established executives who helped engineer quick turnarounds with the LA Clippers, Oklahoma City Thunder and Hawks, respectively.

And Leonsis paid them at top rates for NBA executives, according to multiple league sources.

But where to start?

On the team’s current roster, only rookie forward Bilal Coulibaly, whom the Wizards acquired by trading up with Indiana to take him with the seventh pick of this year’s draft, is a near-certainty to be here long term.

Forward Deni Avdija, who just signed a contract extension with Washington, and 2021 first-round pick Corey Kispert also could be here for a while, as well as 7-footer Tristan Vukčević, the Wizards’ 2023 second-rounder who is playing overseas this season at Partizan Mozzart Bet in the Adriatic League. Emphasis on “could be.”

Guard Jordan Poole, Washington’s major offseason trade acquisition, has struggled to live up to expectations so far. Through the first quarter of the season, he’s been far from the efficient three-level scorer the Wizards hoped he’d be. Entering play Sunday, he was shooting just 41.5 percent overall and 30.4 percent on 3-pointers.

Defensively, he’s been worse. Individual defensive statistics can be notoriously wonky, and no one stat tells you everything. But one of the better ones comes from the website Dunks & Threes, whose offensive and defensive Estimated Plus-Minus is one of the more respected metrics among the advanced statistics community.

Among shooting guards in the NBA, in Defensive Estimated Plus-Minus, only Brooklyn’s Cam Thomas, at minus-2.9, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Austin Reaves (minus-3.1) and the San Antonio Spurs’ Malaki Branham (minus-3.3) are worse so far this season than Poole, at a minus-2.4 DEPM entering play Sunday.

And yet: Poole is still just 24. When he’s locked in offensively, as he demonstrated in the Wizards’ win over the Pacers on Friday, scoring 30 points on 12-of-18 shooting, he is very hard to guard. And while his four-year, $128 million contract extension, which kicked in this season, is big, it’s still significantly less than the remaining $207.7 million remaining on Beal’s five-year, $251 million max contract, signed in 2022.

The Wizards’ new regime was determined to move Beal’s contract, and did so, trading Beal to Phoenix in June, marking the official start of Washington’s teardown.

Even though Poole has gotten off to a poor start, his and 28-year-old Kyle Kuzma’s presence nonetheless make it easier for Washington’s other players on offense.

Coulibaly has encountered a few bumps in the road during his rookie season, but his promising signs have outweighed his growing pains. Team officials are high on his even-keeled personality and on his potential. And the 19-year-old said after a recent practice that he’s on board with the team’s long-range plans for improvement, even as it means taking a figurative beating on the court in the short term.

Indeed, league sources said the Wizards’ long-term approach, which is allowing Coulibaly to receive significant playing time early in his rookie season and allowing the Wizards to be patient with his development, was a central reason Coulibaly’s primary agent allowed Washington to be the only NBA team to host Coulibaly for a private workout session before the draft.

“Right now, yeah, we’ve been struggling a little bit,” Coulibaly said last week. “But I know like, middle of the year, after the All-Star break, I think we’ll be way better. Just trying to figure out what we’re missing, what’s wrong with what we’re doing. We’ll be better, for sure.”

The model Leonsis wants the Wizards to emulate is the “five-year plan” used by the Washington Capitals, under team chairman Dick Patrick and president of hockey operations and general manager Brian MacLellan. The plan is not a literal document, of course; it’s a guide map, the team’s philosophy on roster construction.

When Alex Ovechkin was in his prime, the plan centered on challenging for Stanley Cups with the future Hall of Famer in the lead, surrounding him with high-end talent like center Nicklas Bäckström, whose passing wizardry provided the perfect complementary skill to Ovechkin’s blasts from his left-wing “office.” As the Caps’ core ages, the team is attempting to pivot to younger players to carry the load yet remain competitive as Ovechkin chases Wayne Gretzky’s career goals-scored record.

Per Wizards sources, Washington will prioritize players in the NBA Draft who possess positional length — similar to the philosophy of the Orlando Magic — along with high basketball IQs and strong work ethics. With those three traits, the Wizards think they can maximize any draft pick’s skill levels to the utmost. Ultimately, of course, the goal is to build around a superstar or superstars.

The Capitals did this after Ovechkin’s arrival, with the first pick of the 2004 NHL Draft. They built a strong nucleus to supplement Ovechkin’s skills, which led to 11 straight seasons with winning records, culminating in their 2018 Cup run.

They hit on multiple first-round picks — Bäckström (fourth overall, 2006), John Carlson (27th overall, 2008), Evgeny Kuznetsov (26th overall, 2010) and Tom Wilson (16th overall, 2012). Other first-rounders like Marcus Johansson (24th, 2009) and Jakub Vrana (13th, 2014) were also contributors during those years.

By contrast, the Wizards have gotten little significant impact from their drafts since taking John Wall first overall in 2010 and Beal third overall in 2012. The new regime must do better.

“We’re going to get some draft picks wrong. That’s going to happen,” Winger said before training camp.

But that can’t happen with regularity in upcoming years if the Wizards are going to get out of their abyss.

An NBA model for the Wizards to follow are the Thunder, who play in a market that is never sexy enough to attract superstar free agents — and where Dawkins spent 15 seasons, including his last three as co-vice president of basketball operations. Winger understands the Thunder Way too; he worked as assistant general manager/team counsel in Oklahoma City for seven years. The Thunder have to be draft-centric to survive.

Oklahoma City’s never-ending flurry of trades since dealing Paul George to the Clippers and Russell Westbrook to the Houston Rockets in 2019 has the Thunder sitting on a treasure chest of future first-round picks that is so large, the team can’t possibly use them all. To be sure, not all of their picks since have panned out. But OKC has been able to take so many swings that it’s been able to absorb occasional misses.

The Thunder built a championship contender with an incredible run of first-round hits over a seven-year period between 2007 and 2013 — Kevin Durant, Westbrook, Serge Ibaka, James Harden, Reggie Jackson and Steven Adams. (In KD’s and Westbrook’s first year together, 2008-09, the Thunder started out 3-29 en route to a 23-59 season. After taking Harden third in the 2009 draft, OKC’s kids turned the corner and never looked back, finishing 50-32.)

They’re trying to do it again. Since 2021, OKC has taken Josh Giddey, Tre Mann, Chet Holmgren, Ousmane Dieng and Jalen Williams in the first round. (OKC also took big man Alperen Şengün in 2021 and wing Peyton Watson in 2022, but those players were traded in separate draft-night deals with Houston and Denver for … more future first-round picks.) And this year, the Thunder acquired Kentucky guard Cason Wallace in a draft-night trade with Dallas. Wallace is already a part of the Thunder’s rotation as a spot starter and sixth man.

But those players all, of course, complement guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, acquired from the Clippers in the George trade. Gilgeous-Alexander has turned into a first-team All-NBA talent, a true superstar. Was there some luck involved in SGA becoming that great on the Thunder’s watch? Yes. But it’s amazing how “lucky” the same teams are, over and over.

No one knows yet what Coulibaly will become. But he is indicative of the “big swings” mindset that Washington’s new brain trust wants to take in future drafts.

His potential was known to the most serious of bird dogs as he worked his way up through France’s basketball system. But he still had played only a portion of one year at the highest professional level in France — a supporting role for Metropolitans 92, the LNB Pro A league team, last season. Metropolitans, of course, featured Victor Wembanyama, and most people’s eyes were on the 7-5 phenom, not Coulibaly.

Coulibaly’s unusual length and emerging game playing alongside Wembanyama hinted at potential major upside, but taking a player with so little pro experience with a top-10 pick is still a gamble.

He is the kind of player the Wizards, during most of the last two decades, would rarely pick. The constant pressure to be just good enough to contend for a playoff spot, a consistent goal under Leonsis’ stewardship, made Washington reluctant to take chances in the draft.

It’s not that the people Washington drafted in recent years — Rui Hachimura, Avdija and Kispert — are bad players. But in draft vernacular, they were viewed pre-draft as “high-floor, low-ceiling” players.

The Wizards need Coulibaly to be the opposite.

At the very least, he projects as a future “3-and-D” forward, someone who can guard multiple positions — the kind of athletic wing the Wizards have rarely had on their roster, but which almost every other team in the league has, often in abundance.

But he’s just one piece. The Wizards are still years away from having anything approaching a contending roster.

And many teams that begin a total rebuild go years without enough luck in the lottery to be in the enviable position to draft someone thought to become a sure-fire superstar. The draft lottery has always been a crapshoot.

And since 2019, whenthe NBA enacted reforms that flattened the lottery odds to reduce the incentive to tank, the teams with the three worst regular-season records now have only a 14 percent chance apiece of winning the lottery.

Still, Washington will need to accumulate as many bites at the draft apple as possible, and, from their perspective, it would also be nice if they could add some up-and-coming young talent through trades.

After their flurry of offseason deals — Beal to Phoenix, Kristaps Porziņģis to Boston, Chris Paul to Golden State and Monté Morris to Detroit — the Wizards have started to amass their own cupboard of future draft assets, though none of them are on par with what the Thunder acquired when OKC traded George and Westbrook. What the picks do give Washington is the flexibility to get involved in almost any potential trade around the league if it wants.

The Wizards can swap first-round picks with the Suns in 2024, 2026, 2028 and 2030, and have a heavily protected (1-20) 2030 first-rounder incoming from Golden State. Washington also has multiple future second-round picks besides its own: five from the Suns (2024-27, and in 2030); two from Chicago, in 2026 and 2027; the higher of a 2027 second from either Brooklyn or Dallas, one (2027) from Golden State and a 2029 second-rounder from the Lakers, acquired when Washington traded Hachimura to L.A. earlier this year.

The first-round swaps with Phoenix won’t benefit Washington in ’24 and, probably, ’26, because the Suns certainly will have a better record — and, thus, a worse draft pick — than the Wizards will have in those years. But the Wizards are hoping that changes by 2028 and 2030, when Phoenix may be in rebuilding mode.

The Wizards, though, owe a future first-round pick to the Knicks — a pick that Washington originally conveyed to Houston in 2020 as part of the trade that brought Westbrook to D.C. for Wall.

The pick has protections on it that can roll it over for the next three years — 1 through 12 in 2024, 1 through 10 in 2025 and 1 through 8 in 2026. That means if the Wizards receive a top-12 pick for the 2024 draft, the pick obligation to New York would roll over to 2025, and Washington would keep its 2024 first-rounder. If the Wizards then receive a top-10 pick in the 2025 draft, the pick obligation to New York would roll over to 2026, and the Wizards would keep their 2025 first.

And if the Wizards then receive a top-eight pick for the 2026 draft, they will only owe New York a second-rounder in 2026 and a second-rounder 2027 to satisfy the trade obligation to the Knicks — and the Wizards would, again, get to keep the first-rounder in 2026. And Washington really wants to hold onto that 2026 first-rounder.

League sources said they would be shocked if Washington ever conveys the first-round pick to New York. Those league sources expect the Wizards to remain one of the league’s worst teams in 2024-25 and in 2025-26.

So, while Leonsis loathes the word “tank,” his team will certainly benefit by remaining bad enough the next two-plus years to keep that pick.

The 2024 NBA Draft is not viewed as having many impactful players, or, at least, does not have a clear, consensus top level at present. That, however, does not absolve the new front office from improving on the bleak draft performance of the previous regime.

The relative weakness of the 2024 draft is one reason Winger, Dawkins and Schlenk wanted this year’s team to gain some measure of momentum on the court and not necessarily finish with one of the league’s worst records. Although they never had high expectations this year, the team has underperformed.

The 2025 draft has a couple of potential franchise-level players at the very top — notably forward Cooper Flagg, a recent commit to Duke whose skills project to impact immediately in the NBA, assuming he’s a one-and-done player. But the draft as a whole is not viewed as especially deep, meaning a team without a top-five pick in ’25 may not get a difference-making talent.

But, per league sources, the Wizards view the 2026 draft — and, to be sure, there’s no way of knowing for certain, nearly three years out, about players who are currently 15 and 16 years old — to be much better, potentially, than ’24 or ’25. Forward Cam Boozer, the son of former NBA forward Carlos Boozer, is among the projected top picks, but prime talents are expected to be available well into the first round.

Other teams concur with that projection.

“That’s the one (2026) that could have depth to it,” a GM of a Western Conference team said.

A good comparison to 2026 would be the 2021 draft, led by Cade Cunningham, who was taken by Detroit with the first pick. That draft also produced strong talent throughout the first round: Evan Mobley, who went third overall, to Cleveland; Scottie Barnes (fourth, Toronto); Giddey (sixth); Franz Wagner (eighth, Orlando), Şengün (16th) and Trey Murphy III (17th, New Orleans). That year, with the 15th pick, Washington took Kispert.

Ideally, Washington would add to its draft stash by moving some of its current veterans for more picks or young players with upside. But, with few exceptions this season, the Wizards rarely have the best player on the court at any given moment.

This creates a problem: Who, aside from Coulibaly, on the current roster, would bring back an enviable trade package?

For the moment, nobody would offer much for Poole.

Kuzma, who contributed as a key role player to the Lakers’ 2019-20 championship team, is probably the player who could command the best package of any current player on the roster other than Coulibaly. Kuzma’s four-year, $90 million contract extension, signed in July, has descending salaries each season, which would make it more palatable for potential trade partners.

Veterans such as Tyus Jones, Delon Wright and Landry Shamet are worth their weight in character and professionalism. But Jones and Wright will be unrestricted free agents at season’s end, and it’s uncertain whether they would want to re-up in D.C. for a rebuild that will take years.

Danilo Gallinari, a 35-year-old forward also in the last year of his contract, could entice playoff contenders ahead of the upcoming trade deadline. With his 3-point shooting, Gallinari would provide the kind of floor spacing that is so important during the postseason.

Even after this season, the Wizards probably won’t be completely done deconstructing the current roster until the 2025 trade deadline.

When Leonsis hired Winger, Leonsis gave assurances that he will remain patient with any process that emphasizes building through the draft. But circ*mstances may have changed in recent days.

Last week’s announcement that Leonsis intends to move the Wizards and Capitals to a new $2 billion entertainment district in Alexandria, Va., could put a deadline on the Wizards’ willingness to rebuild slowly. If the nonbinding plan Leonsis and Virginia government officials have reached gets approved by the Virginia General Assembly, the two teams would be scheduled to move into a new arena in 2028.

It’s fair, then, to ask if, along with a post-Ovechkin Capitals squad, Leonsis would be satisfied moving into a gleaming new building with a Wizards team that might still be losing games in bunches, or still might not have an obvious future star on the roster.

The Wizards have so far to go. And the short-term prospects are so very bleak. There’s no guarantee that going the bad-record/high-draft-pick route will work. But for teams at or near the top of the NBA heap that aren’t longtime player destinations like L.A. or Miami, some version of this strategy is usually the path they’ve followed.

“I’m just trying to stay focused,” Coulibaly said. “It’s a rebuild. We’ve got to be — patient, that’s how you say it? We’ve got to be patient, just wait for our turn. Other teams like Orlando, they’ve been through it. So I’m not worried about it.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Dylan Buell, Jesse D. Garrabrant / Getty Images)