The Washington Wizards have a plan, finally

The Washington Wizards have long been jogging on what NBA fans like to call the “treadmill of mediocrity."

From 2019, when D.C. legend John Wall ruptured his achilles in a freak accident at home, to 2023, when the front office finally traded away star guard Bradley Beal, the Wizards fielded a team that was consistently middling: not good enough to compete for a title, nor bad enough to reap the benefits of the league’s draft lottery, where teams with worse records have better odds of scoring top picks. 

As a fan, the experience has been miserable. Being a fan of a bad team for a few seasons is a rite of passage; being a fan of a team with the longest conference finals drought across all major American men's sports is a punishment.

The Wizards online fandom reflected the bleak state of the team: two of the four most popular posts of all time on the team’s subreddit are about staff getting fired. Tweets from fans ranged from despairing to well, despairing. That’s not to say that fans didn’t have fun — the Wizards bed meme was so potent that even players acknowledged it — but the general vibe was dour.

This season, the mood has taken a turn for the better. At the end of the 2022-23 season, the Wizards’ newly hired braintrust of executives finally decided it was time to get off the treadmill. Instead of tinkering around the edges by making small trades, the team finally rebuilt in earnest.

The front office traded away stars Beal and Kristaps Porzingis for draft picks and rising talent like Jordan Poole. The team finished with its worst-ever win total last season and positioned itself to take advantage of the 2024 NBA Draft.

That strategy netted the Wizards three first round draft picks: Alexandre Sarr, Kyshawn George, and Baltimore-native Carlton “Bub” Carrington.

Along with last year’s first-round draft pick, Bilal Coulibaly, they form one of the most exciting cores of young players in the league. (Yes, that's three Francophone players. Yes, fans have already started calling the team the Ouizards or Les Sorciers.) All three first-year players are ranked in the top ten rookies of the season so far and Coulibaly has made a big leap in his sophomore season.

The 20-year-old forward is turning into a bonafide star, averaging a much-improved 15 points a game while bumping up his shooting percentages. And the campaign to make Coulibaly’s nickname the “Parisian Pippen” is gaining steam off his highlight dunks.

The online Wizards fandom took  note of the encouraging start to the season. Excited posts about the team abounded on Twitter, where dedicated stan accounts were created for Coulibaly and Sarr, and the team’s subreddit was notably more positive than the last few seasons.

“You’ve got a young core, you have a direction, you have a competent front office… It's finally kind of fun again, so fans are starting to be more active on social media,” says Greg Finberg, a contributor to the Bullets Forever fan blog who hasn’t missed a game since the start of the 2014-15 season.

The young Wizards all started the season playing hard: hustling in transition and playing good defense. Don’t take my word for it though; famously critical NBA star Draymond Green said after a recent Golden State Warriors visit to the capital that “that’s the first time we’ve seen a Washington Wizards team play that hard in years.”

That energy rubbed off on other young players on the team like Poole, who is having his best season since winning the 2022 championship with the Warriors.

After a promising start, the Wizards have reeled off a nine-game losing streak. Some of the games have been ugly, with old bad habits creeping in and effort visibly lacking.

“So I'll take the responsibility for the last two nights, not playing up to the competitive disposition that we should be playing with, especially defensively,” head coach Brian Keefe said after a 28-point loss to the New York Knicks. “That will be addressed as a group and we will get better. But that wasn't what we need to be, what our standards were. And we have to own that. And we have to look at ourselves and we have to get better."

The skid has dampened a lot of the excitement about the team. “I tweeted two weeks ago that this team was very fun,” Finberg posted after that same Knicks game this week. “Boy was I wrong.”

But I’m not ready to abandon hope just yet. The blueprint is there: the Wizards started winning back fans by committing to its young talents and playing with high intensity. Clearly communicating to fans that the team is sacrificing winning in the short term to develop young players and position itself to take advantage of the next draft is critical. Doubling down on playing exciting new players while still being competitive and engaged is the best way to win support back.