LOVERRO: Pretending the Wizards are close is just an insult to team’s fans

Friday the Washington Wizards held their Fan Appreciation Night at Capital One Arena.

On Monday, they held Fan Insult Day.

Meeting with reporters to go review the season, the leaders of this organization tried to come up with ways to describe yet another campaign of failure, another year of futility, another pile of dirt tossed on this “basketball” city.

It would be so much easier if people didn’t love the game so much in this town. That love has been buried by more than 40 years of neglect, save for the occasional illusionary moments of promise.

One member of the Wizards’ brain trust actually spoke the truth of how nauseating this 35-47 season was. Another absolved himself of blame, saying it wasn’t his fault and tried to make himself out to be a victim. Another used the cursed word “context.”

Here’s some “context” for you — the Wizards haven’t won 50 games in an NBA season since 1979. Since then, the franchise has had 30 losing seasons. Since Transparent Ted Leonsis — who took over full ownership of the team in 2010, pledging a commitment to success and transparency and told Wizards fans, “You want us to compete for and win championships,” — his teams have a combined record of 456-574 and have failed to make it past the second round of the playoffs.    

All of it was insulting — every word. Then again, I’m not sure there is anything anyone can say to ease the pain for this long-suffering fan base. Both the truth and the lies hurt.

General manager Tommy Sheppard, after his fourth year on the job, spoke the truth. “We won 35 games,” he said. “That’s disgusting to me.”

I don’t think Sheppard is going to get a job working for NBC Sports Washington with that kind of attitude.

Bradley Beal, who will make more money than any athlete in the history of this town, said, among other things, don’t look at me. I’m not in charge. “I don’t make the decisions,” he said. “I want everybody to understand in here. I don’t run the team. My name isn’t Tommy Sheppard, my name isn’t Ted Leonsis.”

Beal may be more powerful than both. When he signed his $251 million contract extension, he also got the only full no-trade clause in the league. Sheppard or Leonsis won’t decide Beal’s future here. Beal will.

His name isn’t Iron Man, either. He hasn’t played a full season since 2019. I know that’s not done anymore in the NBA, but he only played 50 games this year and 40 games last season.

When Beal does play, no one will mistake him for a $50 million player — which is what he is earning.

“The way y’all (media) talking, y’all trying to kick me out of here,” Beal continued.

I knew it was the media’s fault.

Truth is the best thing for this team would be to ship Beal out of town. He is not the type of player you can build your franchise on. He’s simply not good enough. Only in an NBA town as woeful as Washington could Beal, Kyle Kuzma and Kristaps Porzingis be considered a “Big Three.”

Both Porzingis and Kuzma are going to be free agents. But Beal isn’t going anywhere, so I guess the media can stop trying to kick him out.

Neither is head coach Wes Unseld, Jr.,  who has two more years on his contract with the team. Sheppard declared that Unseld — the son of franchise legend Wes Unseld — will return despite two straight 35-win seasons.

He is likely returning because Leonsis isn’t about to pay two coaches at the same time. It’s not a good time for Transparent Ted — no home game playoff revenue from either the Wizards or the Capitals. The Capitals shut out of the playoffs really hurts. In the National Hockey League, that’s straight cash for the owner, homey. That goes right back into Ace Rothstein’s skim room.

He could use about 10 Bruce Springsteen concerts.

Unseld was brought here from the Denver Nuggets staff two years ago as a defensive guru. His teams have finished 21st and 23rd in team defense.

“It’s easy to say these are the rankings, and the rankings matter, but without looking at it with context and seeing that we’re not that far off,” Unseld told reporters.

It was worse after the season-ending loss Sunday to the Houston Rockets.

“There’s still a lot of positives,” Unseld said. “I think sometimes we get caught up, everything’s about results and we lose sight of the process.”

If it was about results, that building on F Street would be empty for Wizards games. As it was, in a year when the NBA had record attendance, the Wizards finished 21st overall, averaging 17,328 for home games. But more revealing, they finished at the bottom of the league in filling the building with an 84% rate of capacity.

Context? The Magic-Bird era passed this team by. So did the Jordan era, the Shaq and Kobe era and now we are winding up the LeBron era. This franchise started that run of irrelevancy with a 39-43 record and finished this year 35-47.

Did Transparent Ted weigh in? As of Tuesday afternoon, he did not. But this is what the owner said on his blog after last season: “Regardless of how others will evaluate the team’s performance this season, we did not live up to our own expectations. We fell short on getting our defense up to par and we weren’t able to improve upon our playoff appearance from last season. Injuries and illness, while not excuses, certainly factored into our inconsistency.”

Rinse, wash, repeat.

You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.