WASHINGTON — The Washington Wizards’ deconstruction and metamorphosis into one of the league’s youngest teams is almost complete.
Now that Kyle Kuzma has been traded, the only players from the Tommy Sheppard era still with the team are Johnny Davis, Anthony Gill and Corey Kispert. In the 20 months since Michael Winger and Will Dawkins were hired to lead the Wizards’ front office, Winger and Dawkins have torn down the low-end-mediocre roster they inherited and have gutted it almost completely, adding five or six intriguing prospects, while they’ve also created the league’s top lottery contender for this year and next.
The decisions to trade Kuzma and Patrick Baldwin Jr. to the Milwaukee Bucks and trade Jonas Valančiūnas to the Sacramento Kings on Wednesday reaffirmed and accelerated the team’s strategy. Washington isn’t merely a franchise that has bottomed out. With its roster skewing even younger than it already was a few days ago, the team is bottoming out to an even more pronounced degree.
This is what a teardown rebuild looks like — and ought to look like — in its early stages. You move off many of the veterans who have sacrificed but have grown sick and tired of losing. In the process, you add as many future draft picks and as many promising young players as possible and then load those youngsters with heavy minutes.
Team officials will call this strategy “player development,” and that’s not incorrect. The minutes to come for players such as Bub Carrington, Bilal Coulibaly, Kyshawn George, Alexandre Sarr and newly added rookie guard AJ Johnson will play a gargantuan role in their growth or perhaps, in a worst-case scenario, their stagnation.
But let’s also be blunt. This path is also about protecting the team’s hard-fought odds for this May’s lottery and for maximizing their odds for the 2026 lottery. Not remaining bottomed out over the next season and a half and not attempting to play for lottery combinations would be organizational malpractice. Being able to draft Cooper Flagg or Dylan Harper this year or AJ Dybantsa in 2026 would change the franchise’s trajectory overnight. To be relevant in this league, you simply must have a cornerstone-level player. You must have high-level talent, and the reality is that none of the players the Wizards have right now — while promising — are close to sure bets to develop into a top-two or top-three player on a contending-level team.
To put it another way: As several league sources from rival teams have told me in recent weeks, one of the worst things that could happen to the Wizards between now and July 2026 would be for them to accumulate a bunch of young players who develop into merely nice, solid NBA players but who are not good enough to drive winning in a real way.
As an example, let’s take Carrington, the 19-year-old guard who leads all NBA rookies in total minutes played and ranks second among rookies in total assists. As one league source told me over the last week, Carrington appears on track to grow into a top-nine player on a good team.
But where, exactly, within that nine will he land? For the Wizards, it would be a fantastic outcome if Carrington develops into a good team’s third-, fourth- or fifth-best player; since Carrington was the 14th pick in what was thought to be a bad draft, that outcome would be an overwhelming victory for the Wizards. With the caveat that young players on bad teams are notoriously difficult to project, Carrington, in that evaluator’s opinion, most likely will develop into a No. 5, No. 6 or No. 7 spot contributor on a good team. That would still be a win relative to where Carrington was drafted.
A team that’s starting at the bottom needs as many bites at the player-development apple as it can muster. You immerse those players in an elite developmental system — top coaching, top strength training and access to off-the-court resources — and you do your best to help some of them hit. That’s part of what has separated the Oklahoma City Thunder, where Dawkins worked for 15 years, from their counterparts. The Thunder lucked out in the lottery to be able to draft Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden, but the Thunder also made their own luck by identifying relatively undervalued youngsters such as Luguentz Dort, Jalen Williams and Aaron Wiggins and helping them grow. That’s part of Oklahoma City’s genius. Winger and Wizards coach Brian Keefe spent formative parts of their careers with the Thunder, too.
Through the lens of bites at the apple is how Wednesday’s acquisitions of Johnson and Sidy Cissoko should be viewed.
At 6 foot 5, Johnson possesses, as The Athletic’s NBA Draft analyst Sam Vecenie wrote last spring, “about as perfect a combination as you’ll find of athletic tools and length,” but he also will need time to gain enough strength to deal with NBA-level physicality.
At 6-6, Cissoko, the incoming player from the Valančiūnas trade, might be waived (and if that happens, he could be re-signed to a two-way contract if a two-way spot opens up). But if the Wizards retain him, Cissoko has, as Vecenie wrote before the 2023 draft, “a phenomenal frame for the NBA” and “many skills that translate toward him being a terrific role player.”
Washington entered Wednesday with the NBA’s 11th-youngest roster, with an average age of 25 years and 305 days, according to Sportradar. With Johnson and Cissoko now on board in place of Kuzma and Valančiūnas, and with a trade of veteran guard Malcolm Brogdon possible before the deadline Thursday afternoon, Washington is trending even younger.
Young teams can win if they have top-level talents. Oklahoma City opened Wednesday as the league’s youngest team and as the team with the league’s best record.
But teams that play a large number of first- and second-year players simultaneously — as Washington has done almost this entire season — are almost 100 percent certain to struggle over the course of a season. Despite Valančiūnas appearing in all of the Wizards’ first 49 games, and with Kuzma and Brogdon missing large portions of the season with injuries, the Wizards opened the year 8-41 and compiled one of the worst net ratings in the league’s last three decades.
The Wizards defeated the injury-riddled Minnesota Timberwolves on Saturday and the injury-decimated Charlotte Hornets on Monday. It’s no coincidence that Sarr missed that game because of an ankle injury, forcing Valančiūnas to start at center and fellow veteran center Richaun Holmes to play heavy minutes. It’s also no coincidence that Keefe never played the trio of Coulibaly, George and Carrington simultaneously in those victories.
It’s not that Sarr, Coulibaly, George and Carrington have low upsides. It’s that lineups overloaded with rookies and a second-year player find it incredibly difficult to win because of their inexperience and because their bodies have not filled out.
The Wizards defeated the Nets 119-102 on Wednesday night in Brooklyn to complete their first three-game winning streak since March 21-25, 2024. It was a great night for them. Coulibaly recorded his first career triple-double, with 11 points, 10 rebounds and a career-high 11 assists. But I’m arguing that the game was an anomaly, not a harbinger of what will occur the rest of this season. After all, the Wizards sank a scorching 20 of their 43 3-point attempts, and it’s rare for any team, even a veteran team, to shoot that well from long range.
The chances of Middleton being rerouted to another team before Thursday’s deadline are almost zero, a league source told The Athletic. The Wizards expect that Middleton, an Olympic gold medalist and a crucial contributor to the Milwaukee Bucks’ 2020-21 NBA title, will become the model example for the young players to emulate.
Jordan Poole has embraced his own leadership role and has been unselfish on the court, but Middleton is 33 and Poole is only 25. Middleton should be the alpha male in the locker room. It’s going to be a tough transition for Middleton to go from title contention in Milwaukee to lottery contention in Washington, but he’s so highly regarded throughout the industry that he seems highly likely to accept that challenge. To his credit, that’s how he’s built.
Still, in the season’s remaining two-plus months, now that Kuzma and Valančiūnas are gone and with Brogdon possible to follow them out the door, you can expect the Wizards to lean even more heavily on their young players and, in the process, keep maximizing their lottery hopes.
There will be more misery in the months ahead.
But that’s reason to be hopeful. In the NBA, short-term misery can lead to long-term elation.
This is what a rebuild is supposed to look like. As Wednesday’s trades proved, the Wizards are not taking any chances. They might not wind up with the luck they need from May’s lottery or the lottery in May 2026. But if they don’t get lucky, it won’t be because they didn’t try.
(Top photo of Jordan Poole and D’Angelo Russell: Wendell Cruz / Imagn Images)
