The Wizards weren't built to be this bad. But how much losing can young players endure?

WASHINGTON A rock-bottom moment in a season already saturated with low points occurred one week ago.

The 2024-25 Washington Wizards were in the midst of their most lopsided loss yet, a beatdown on their home court by the Dallas Mavericks .

Midway through the fourth quarter, with many of the prime seats inside Capital One Arena already vacated, the Mavericks Markieff Morris launched a 3-pointer from the left wing.

Advertisement Bilal Coulibaly , sitting on the bench and unwilling to watch more carnage, turned his head away from the court.

Jordan Poole lowered his head when the ball swished through the net.

Dallas had extended its lead to 42 points, the largest deficit Washington had faced this season.

Eventually, the Mavericks won by 36.

It was the Wizards 16th consecutive defeat, tied for the longest losing streak in their 64 seasons.

The Wizards snapped that streak one game later , but they remain in the throes of an atrocious campaign.

At 3-19, they own the leagues worst record, and are on pace to win 11 games, which would be the worst season in franchise history, worse than the previous 15-67 mark set just last season.

The Wizards rank last leaguewide in offensive rating.

They rank last in defensive rating.

Their cumulative point differential works out to minus-16.2 points per game, which, if it holds, would be the worst single-season point differential in NBA history.

I try to come into seasons with not too much of an expectation, because you just never know how things can go, veteran forward Kyle Kuzma told The Athletic .

I probably thought we could struggle, but never to the extent that we are in the present.

It is no secret how Washington descended to these depths.

Teams require high-end talent to win big in the NBA, and the Wizards are determined to build through the draft, preferably with early picks, even if that means extended losing for a few years in hopes of maximizing their odds in the draft lottery.

A year-plus into a multi-year rebuild, team officials still believe that their future franchise cornerstones are currently playing in college or high school.

This explains why this years roster has been designed to finish near the bottom of the league standings what fans commonly call tanking.

Advertisement But team officials did not expect the team to be this outmatched.

The front office made offseason moves it hoped would fortify the roster.

The Wizards acquired veteran point guard Malcolm Brogdon from Portland, though the Wizards primarily made the deal to accrue future draft picks .

The Wizards also signed veteran center Jonas Valanciunas in free agency, a move that initially surprised rival executives and scouts.

Valanciunas and Brogdon were expected to lead off the court, but also to contribute during games.

But Brogdon has missed 13 of the teams first 22 games with thumb, knee and hamstring injuries.

Kuzma, Washingtons leading scorer last season, has missed nearly half of the teams games so far.

Im on record with our athletes and our coaches, telling them that I think were going to be better than most people expect us to be, Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger told The Athletic .

A lot of (the reason we havent been better) is injuries, unfortunately.

A lot.

A lot of it is still trying to artfully thread the needle of development and competition.

Thats really hard.

Were combining a lot of variables that are more art than science.

The Wizards replaced three starters from last years 15-67 team veteran point guard Tyus Jones , wing Deni Avdija and center Daniel Gafford with rookies or second-year players.

Coulibaly, in his second season, and rookies Alex Sarr , Kyshawn George and Bub Carrington have played heavy minutes, often simultaneously and, predictably, have struggled at times.

We are immersed in a very difficult stretch right now, general manager Will Dawkins told The Athletic .

But we remain committed to the long-term sustainability of the organization, he added.

Our staff and players have continued to work, and are growing.

We will continue to stack the positive developmental gains and, at the end of the season, put proper perspective on the totality of the year.

Dont worry about the whole thing right now; at the end of the year, lets look up and see what we accomplished.

Theyre getting better, and theyre still working, and thats the main thing.

What we signed up for is hard, and we know it.

Advertisement The existing mark for worst point differential per game in a season was set by the 11-71 Mavericks in 1992-93, at minus-15.2.

This year, the Wizards are in a class by themselves in point differential.

The next-worst team is New Orleans , with a point differential of minus-11.7.

In the advanced-stats world, thats a chasm.

And if the Wizards current dead-last offensive and defensive ratings persist, they would be the first team since the 2017-18 Suns to finish last in the league in both categories in the same season.

A team source allows that the Wizards should have been able to be more competitive in many of those games, even if Washingtons current talent level isnt good enough to have won them.

Too often, the Wizards have collapsed after suffering a garden-variety run from an opponent, something that happens just about every night in the NBA.

You call a timeout, you regroup and you fight back.

But too often this season, theres been no fighting back.

In the modern NBA, where the 3-pointer is dominant, you can get back into a game in a matter of minutes with sustained effort and focus.

Theres no excuse for giving up that easily.

Its being addressed, I can tell you that, the team source said.

Itll look different.

Nonetheless, the Wizards continue to insist that a rebuild through the draft is the best and fastest way to relevance.

But depending on the draft remains a potentially treacherous path.

So much has to go right for a tanking team to obtain even one great player through the lottery and draft, let alone multiple difference-makers, because of lottery rules designed to discourage tanking that were implemented in 2019.

These days, the teams with the three worst records enter the lottery with equal and lower odds of winning an early pick: 14 percent for first overall, 13.4 percent for second, 12.7 for third and 12 percent for fourth.

So, even if Washington were to finish with the worst record in the league, it would have the exact same chance at the top pick as the second- and third-worst teams.

Advertisement Still, there is a saving grace to having the leagues worst overall record.

That team can receive no worse than the fifth overall pick in the draft.

The team with the second-worst record will have a 20-percent chance of falling to the sixth pick.

You might then think that Wizards officials constructed their team to be at the very bottom of the league standings to ensure it would not fall to No.

6, or worse.

But a team official insisted that finishing dead-last was not the goal, adding that the teams scouting department believes there will be more than five high-level players available in the 2025 NBA Draft.

The top of the 2026 draft, featuring 6-foot-9 wing A.J.

Dybantsa, who just committed to play at BYU next season, could be just as impactful if the Wizards have additional lottery luck.

In the interim, losing so many games by so many points right now is brutal for those who have to absorb such beatings.

Sustained losing can be corrosive.

It saps spirit and will and hope, both for players and a teams fan base the very intangibles a rebuilding team needs most of all during an extensive roster teardown.

(Through their first 12 home games, per the Elias Sports Bureau, the Wizards are averaging 16,442 fans per game at Capital One Arena, which ranks 27th in the league the same spot Washington occupied last season.) What were going through is really wearing on all of us, including myself, fourth-year swingman Corey Kispert said.

But I have the luxury of experience and I have the luxury of going through times like this, and its my responsibility to help people on our team who dont have the experience that I do to stay with it.

Wizards coach Brian Keefe has endured a similar situation before, with the 2008-09 Thunder .

In his second season as a player development coach, Keefe worked closely with a young Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook .

That Thunder team opened the season 3-29, and fired coach P.J.

Carlesimo after 13 games.

Over the teams final 50 games, with Scott Brooks as the interim coach, the Thunder went 20-30.

We developed a lot of resiliency, Keefe told The Athletic .

I think our players, our organization really dug in and really used that as a momentum to build us to go forward.

Obviously, (those were) tough times.

...

Those guys developed a toughness, a mental toughness, a resiliency, and then we really just embraced the work, and those guys really embraced the everyday building of habits and working on their craft and their game.

And I think that really set the franchise forward during that time.

Advertisement Durant and Westbrook are, obviously, two of the top talents of their generation.

Keefe stopped well short of comparing them to anyone else.

But they still had to go through growing pains on the way to superstardom.

It wasnt like they just rolled out of bed and were winning 50 or 60 games, he said.

They had to go through some adversity, and I think we used that adversity as a foundation piece for what we were doing there.

The Wizards are certainly dealing with adversity now, and Keefe said, We are working and developing a work rate and effort and habit-building thats setting us up for long-term success.

Washingtons front office continues to believe, through both data and experience, that the best and fastest way to develop players is to put them on the court, as soon as possible, and for them to play as much as possible even as their inexperience leads to on-court mistakes, and their lack of physical strength as rookies, compared to the grown men they play against every night, also leads to more losing.

Sarr, taken second overall, started Washingtons first 20 games until lower-back soreness recently sidelined him.

Carrington averages almost 29 minutes a game.

George started six games early in the season and is still averaging 26 minutes a night.

Coulibaly, whom the Wizards still believe has significant upside, continues to start despite recent prolonged struggles on offense in his second NBA season.

Coulibaly averages the most minutes by far on the team, at 34.6 per night.

But you dont win in the NBA playing kids.

Sarr and Carrington are 19.

Coulibaly is 20.

George turns 21 today.

When the four of them have played together, Washingtons defensive rating has bounced between bad ( 114.6 per 100 possessions in 68 minutes so far alongside Poole , with an abysmal minus-17.9 net rating per 100 possessions) and obscenely bad (122.3, in 51 minutes playing with Kispert, though the net rating with that group is slightly less awful, at minus-11.1).

Advertisement Washington has lost 10 games by 20 points or more.

Eight of the nine other defeats were by 10 to 19 points.

But there is no pressure on Keefe, the former assistant coach elevated to the top spot after Washington fired Wes Unseld Jr.

last January.

Winger, speaking about Keefe, told The Athletic : He understands the value of playing time for young players, and he understands the importance of not letting a single teaching moment go down the drain.

The Wizards continue to invest heavily in player development, with coaches, athletic trainers and a fortified analytics department.

They continue to have decimal meetings with their players every 10 games or so , where improvement is measured not so much by individual stats, but by goals wrapped in team concepts.

How are players doing on their fill spots? How are they doing on closeouts? How are they protecting the rim? What is their defensive rebounding percentage? Carrington also has questions for his bosses during those meetings.

I just feel like, being in the position I was, being a coachs son, I feel like I always like knowing the whys, Carrington told The Athletic .

It makes the actions a lot easier for me to do, knowing why I have to do them.

And are the Wizards answers good ones? Great answers, Carrington says.

(With) everyone, the communication is top-notch.

Its hard to think about incremental improvements, though, when youre getting your doors blown off every night.

But the Wizards brass believes those kinds of shocks, a few times a month, can be a good test to see how their young players react to stressful situations.

There is an old saying in basketball: If they dont bite as puppies, they wont bite when theyre grown.

I would say the whole organization, Will being the GM, and our coach communicates to us, often, We drafted you guys for a reason, Carrington said.

Dont be scared to make a mistake.

Thats the main thing they try to get across, not necessarily go out there and do whatever move works.

Advertisement Its more like, Dont be scared to make a mistake.

Play your game.

Use the things that got you (here) and see if it sticks.

Thats the main thing they tell us.

Moreover, the front office encourages the young players to experiment on the court.

This would explain why, for example, Sarr continues to take 3-pointers at a high volume 4.4 attempts per game despite shooting an abysmal 25.0 percent behind the arc.

On a team this bad, improvements are seen in moments, not in days or weeks or months.

Against the Bucks earlier this month, Coulibaly took Giannis Antetokounmpo on a defensive switch.

The Greek Freak tried to post-up Coulibaly down low.

But Coulibaly held his ground and forced Antetokounmpo into a mid-range shot.

It was a game Washington, of course, wound up losing.

But it was a flash of potential.

And the long-range dream is to have five interchangeable players like that on the floor.

The Wizards have been adamant that they also plan to hold onto most of their remaining veterans as long as possible during the rebuild.

In particular, Wizards officials insist that they want Valanciunas and his professionalism around their young guys for the long haul.

Similarly, Washington has high hopes for forward Saddiq Bey , who signed a three-year, $19 million deal last summer, but who is likely to miss most of this season rehabbing a torn ACL.

Washington gave Kispert a four-year, $54 million extension last October.

And Kispert wants to be in D.C.

when things turn around.

If they turn around.

You have to keep reminding yourself that the really good players and the great ones in this league, and even in life dont run away from hard times, Kispert said.

You run to them, and hard times like this that were in is what develops strong character and helps you move forward.

Carrington, also, insists that, while the losing is hard, hes encouraged for the future.

But, how, at 3-19, and when losing in such ugly fashion most nights? Advertisement The fact that you can go 4 and 19, he said.

Theres a game, literally, tomorrow, when you think about it.

I would say thats what keeps me going, keeps me grounded.

Win, lose, draw.

Good, bad performance.

Theres another game, so you can change the entire narrative the next day.

Thats what keeps me going.

(Photo of Bilal Coulibaly and Jordan Poole: Patrick Smith / Getty Images).

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