On the way into a much-needed vacation next week, I’m going to do something I’ve never done with this space and promise to do only sparingly, and responsibly, in the future: I will write about my favorite basketball team
The Washington Wizards are a niche topic even among NBA fans, let alone anyone who’s come to enjoy reading this site for commentary on culture or geopolitics, but they made national news on both Monday and Tuesday this week. What follows, then, is a written record of my honest thoughts as I continue to process and cope with two franchise-altering moves that I kind of hated. If not necessarily a window into sports fandom generally, then it’s at least a glimpse into a specific type of psychosis that has become familiar and comfortable for me.
A.J. Dybantsa Arrives
I’ll start here: the Wizards had the number one pick in the NBA Draft this week, and I didn’t love the direction they went. After undertaking their first earnest, multi-year rebuild of my lifetime as a fan, three seasons at the bottom of the league have now culminated with a plan to build around 28-year-old Trae Young (we’ll get to him) and 19-year-old A.J. Dybantsa from BYU.
Dybantsa is… fine? He’s young. It’s very early to judge any of these guys, so my conviction is low on any predictions I make here. That qualifier aside, Dybantsa needed the ball in his hands to be effective at BYU. It’s not clear to me that he’ll have any idea how to play off-ball next to Trae Young. Alternately, if Dybantsa’s on the ball, he can score in the midrange and get to the rim, but can he pass? Shoot from three? Rebound? Process the floor? The numbers indicate he was very checked out on defense last year. Maybe that was a function of his workload on offense?
All told, Dybantsa is 6’9, skilled offensively, and decently athletic, but the fear I’ve kept coming back to is that he’s sort of a dumb guy’s idea of a superstar. He can definitely score but he strikes me as closer to a taller DeMar DeRozan or Brandon Ingram than a new Kevin Durant or a successor to Jayson Tatum. Of the top four, I would have felt better taking a swing on Darryn Peterson’s All-NBA upside or Caleb Wilson’s tools and intangibles, and maybe Cam Boozer’s touch, feel and guaranteed 18-and-8 production—though the Boozer pick would have been so boring, I’d probably still rather roll the dice with A.J.
Regardless, I fully recognize that it’s early and Dybantsa is thrilling to have on the roster. I can temper any of my misgivings by reminding myself that five years ago the Wizards traded for Russell Westbrook, started the year 17-32, and rather than tank before a draft that featured Evan Mobley, Scottie Barnes, and Cade Cunningham, they continued playing Westbrook and Beal and went 17-5 over the final two months. They finished in 8th place and lost in five playoff games to the 76ers. Cade went to Detroit that year; the Wizards drafted Corey Kispert.
The following season they won 34 games, again refusing to tank, and drafted Johnny Davis 10th overall, two spots ahead of Jalen Williams. Davis was out of the league within three years. Jalen Williams made an All-NBA team and won a title last year. In 2023, they got lucky with the first three balls drawn at the NBA Lottery and at one point had a 54% chance at drafting Victor Wembanyama, only to end up with the 8th pick in the draft which ultimately landed them Bilal Coulibaly.
Dybantsa, to be clear, is galaxies better than Kispert, Davis, and Coulibaly. He’s more exciting than any other young player D.C.’s had since John Wall arrived 2010. If the news this week had been confined to the number one pick alone, it would have been easy and straight-forward to talk myself into the vision.
Trae Young Remains
The Wizards, unfortunately, are incapable of making it easy. Before Tuesday’s Dybantsa pick, Monday afternoon brought news of a four-year, $212 million deal with Trae Young, which Brian Windhorst called “instantaneously one of the worst contracts in the league.”
On this one, I hate it. I really do. I can accept not winning a championship, but I at least want a team I’ll enjoy watching every night. Trae’s long-term presence will test my mettle on that front. The news here briefly led me to declare to a group chat that Monday was my “Liberation Day” and I’d finally be cutting this team out of my life for good.
My concern is not the contract but the player. He’s one of the worst defenders in the league, he’s not nearly as effective on offense as he was five years ago, he’s a sneaky bad shooter, and he needs the ball in his hands to be effective. This has all been clear for years, but now that Trae’s being paid like a superstar, the Wizards will spend multiple seasons treating him like one, building an offense around him at the expense of other young players who might otherwise develop creation skills of their own.
The Hawks were worse with Young on the court last year and became one of the best teams in the league when they traded him. So: can Trae be the veteran presence who makes life easier for all the young guys in D.C. and helps them take the next step and contend in the East? I don’t know, but we just watched him flunk that test, repeatedly, on a team that was full of lottery picks the entire time he was in Atlanta.
The benefit of the years-long rebuild was that the Wizards, for once in my life, were playing the long game and building toward a title—no shortcuts, adding picks wherever possible, and potentially hitting it big on guys like Kyshawn George and Will Riley. And it was great! I’d like to have the Deni-for-Bub Carrington trade back, but all things considered, the Wizards have more intriguing young talent on the roster today than they’ve had at any point in my entire life. Pushing all those guys to the margins for Trae, who has not won 45 regular season games in his entire career, strikes me as a terrible idea.
The Wiz Stay the Wiz
Let me emphasize now that I feel guilty about the negativity here. Dybantsa’s introductory press conference was fantastic on Thursday, people in D.C. are excited, and while the Wizards have been dreadfully depressing for the past decade, next season should be a sharp departure from that status quo. I feel like I need an Andray Blatche apparition to step out of a strip club and tell me to have some perspective, because here again, the history of this team should mitigate a lot of this week’s hand-wringing.
Five years ago, Washington gave $252 million to Bradley Beal—a crazy number, but also an understandable move to secure the most valuable asset on the roster and retain the option to trade him somewhere down the line. Alas, Tommy Sheppard and Ted Leonsis added a no-trade clause to the deal that guaranteed they would get absolutely fleeced if they ever tried to move him. The Trae deal is one of the worst contracts in the league, but that Beal deal was probably the worst contract in the history of the sport.
10 years ago, the Wizards had been planning for years to pursue DC-native Kevin Durant in free agency, but while teams like the Warriors spent big on a coach like Steve Kerr, the Wizards kept an affordable Randy Wittman as head coach for two years too long, and then underachieved in 2015-2016, the year before KD was available. That summer they finally fired Wittman and spent big money on former OKC coach Scott Brooks to help recruit Durant, but they didn’t even get a meeting with KD and ultimately gave all their money to Andrew Nicholson and Ian Mahinmi.
What’s happened this summer is clearly not as disastrous as those sequences. The problem, though, is that all that tortured history also compounds the frustration and disbelief as the team appears to retrace its steps and relapse into the same behaviors that have always kept this franchise from sustaining any success that matters. Trae’s deal may now foreclose flexibility and veteran additions for the next few years, and the same way the Wizards hung on to Wittman and his affordable salary 10 years ago, Brian Keefe is for some reason returning as head coach in the season they add a number one pick and are supposedly pushing toward the playoffs. It’s been 48 years since this franchise won 50 regular season games, and while I don’t believe in the Curse of Les Boulez, I do believe in chronically bad ownership and shortsighted management.
Washington was so close to finally having an ownership group who understood that building patiently is the best path to sustainable title contention and generating teams that actually matter to people both locally and nationally. And the front office, again, was executing that plan fairly well! My fear on Monday, which remains a fear on Friday, was that this rebuild was a once-in-a-lifetime plan that ownership will never commit to again, and they may have just blown it.
I want to be excited and join the fans who felt great this week, but I can’t help but notice: the Utah Jazz have spent the past three years rebuilding in their own right, and they appear to have better ownership, a better front office, a much better head coach, possibly a better prospect from this year’s draft, and definitely a better team as they enter next season. Also, importantly, the Jazz didn’t punctuate years of patient rebuilding by paying nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to a player who was traded for literally nothing less than six months ago.
The Sunny Side
Now, then: let me take a deep breath.
With all the above concerns noted and on the record for the sake of both posterity and reverse jinx possibilities, I’d like to close by explaining why my Monday afternoon threats were always empty. I realized by Wednesday that I will simply never quit the Wizards. Mainly, it’s the people.
As annoying as this week was for someone who harbored a naive hope that perhaps this time would be different and the Wizards were doing everything the right way, it was genuinely great to have my favorite team back in the national news and have an excuse to talk Wizards with dozens of old friends for the past 96 hours. I can’t imagine one day saying to any of them, “Actually, just FYI, I’m out for life at this point and don’t have any emotional investment in what that team does anymore.”
At any given time, most diehard sports fans are both sides of the bus meme at the top of this article. We obsess over marginal decisions, worry about things we can’t control, and particularly in D.C., it’s easy to get fatalistic and cynical. Clearly that’s where I’ve been for most of the week. But let me look at the sunny side in at least two respects.
First, crushing the Trae deal is easy and deserved, but it probably undersells how much better the team will look with a capable 28 year-old point guard who can attract multiple defenders and create great looks for everyone else on the floor. He’s not perfect, he would not have been my choice, and the contract is genuinely atrocious to an almost inexplicable degree (player option in year four!), but the Wizards can afford it. Trae will be an upgrade over every point guard they’ve had for the past 10 years. Dybantsa, meanwhile, is 19 years old with incredible size and skills. Who knows what his future will look like four or five years from now, and he’s joining a team with Young, Alex Sarr, Anthony Davis, Tre Johnson, Kyshawn George, Will Riley, and Justin Champagnie—half those players have never won 25 games in an NBA season and most of you have probably never seen them play, but I swear, there’s suddenly a lot to work with in D.C.
Second, and more importantly, the mistakes are really not that serious. They’re often hilarious. And what matters more is a community of friends that spent all week talking themselves into A.J., commiserating over Trae, and counting the days until the summer league opener against Darryn Peterson and the Jazz on July 9th. Whatever happens from here, they will be there watching and overreacting, and so will I. Opening night in October is going to be genuinely thrilling for the first time in more than a decade.
Rather than permanently renouncing the Wiz, I found myself reaffirming my fandom as the week went on and planning to hit games with friends who are visiting in the fall. Bandwagoning as a Wolves fan has been fun the past few years, but it’s time to do it in Washington again. Here, I’m reminded that throughout John Wall’s prime I was publicly agitating to fire Ernie Grunfeld and Randy Wittman, I was mostly right, the team underachieved in predictable ways, and that era gave me some of the best in-person sports memories of my lifetime.
This team, on paper, has way more talent than those Wall teams ever did. I’m definitely not getting off the bus now.
Note: I’ll be on vacation next week and won’t publish on Friday, July 3rd (though there will be an episode of Greatest of All Talk at the beginning of NBA free agency).
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.