At halftime of Sunday’s 114-109 loss to the Houston Rockets, a parade of Washington Wizards players in street clothes walked back to the locker room. There was Bradley Beal, Kyle Kuzma and Kristaps Porzingis — Washington’s top trio, who last played together on March 17. There was Deni Avdija, Monte Morris and Delon Wright, all out with various ailments on the injury report.
In Game 82, the list of Washington players who didn’t play was longer than the roster of those who did.
That suited the Wizards just fine.
On the last day of the regular season, there was little to play for, as Washington had been eliminated from postseason contention earlier this month. But the end result — a defeat to a team tied for the NBA’s second-worst record — may help boost the Wizards’ odds of getting a top draft pick.
After all, Washington’s loss — along with the Indiana Pacers’ win over the New York Knicks — helped the Wizards tie for the seventh-worst record in the NBA, which means the team could have the seventh-best odds of landing the first overall pick in June’s draft.
The NBA determines the breaking of tiebreakers with a random drawing, so the Wizards won’t know if they’ll have the seventh- or eighth-best odds to pick first until later this month. But if the Wizards have the seventh-best odds, they’ll have a 7.5% shot instead of a 6% shot of winning the league lottery.
That may not be a substantial difference on paper, but it’s still a consolation prize at the end of a disappointing season for the Wizards.
Washington, after all, finished the season 35-47 — the same record as last season. The Wizards will sit home and out of the playoffs for the second straight year. They are a franchise seemingly stuck in the dreaded no man’s land, and their record again reflected it.
“We’re not where we want to be,” Wizards coach Wes Unseld Jr. said after Sunday’s loss. “No one should be happy with the results of how the season played out, but there’s still a lot of positives. Sometimes we get caught up in the results and we lose sight of the process. It’s important to embrace some of that.”
Process aside, Washington could desperately use some lottery luck in the coming weeks. France’s Victor Wembanyama — the 7-foot-5 do-it-all extraordinaire destined to go at No. 1 — is such a rare commodity that some teams have spent all season trying to position themselves best to land him.
Even the potential second and third overall picks — the G-League’s Scott Henderson and Alabama’s Brandon Miller — figure to have the upside that Washington’s past selections like Rui Hachimura and Corey Kispert have lacked.
Without the lucky bounce of ping-pong balls, it’s hard to imagine how the Wizards will dramatically improve next season. The Wizards have had the 10th, 15th, ninth and ninth picks under general manager Tommy Sheppard — and that range hasn’t helped the Wizards land a franchise-changing talent it badly needs. Sheppard, meanwhile, has said in various interviews over the last few days that the team’s priority over the summer will be to retain free agents Kuzma and Porzingis.
Both forwards are set to cash in after career years this season, though Washington went just 16-19 in games that Kuzma, Porzingis and Beal played together. Sheppard and Co. appear more than willing to run it back despite the under .500 record.
“We still didn’t have enough time to fully get going,” Kuzma said Saturday. “We live in this world where the people that report our game and the people that watch our game believe that 35 games is enough, or a season is enough, to see what you have. But it’s really not. … It’s one thing to really look at our situation and say, ‘OK, we’re 16-19.’
“But we live in a society where we look at headings instead of context. I definitely thought there was something there, for sure.”
So when is enough time to be able to accurately judge a core? Kuzma said he didn’t know.
For Wizards fans, patience is hard to come by. The Wizards have made the playoffs only once — a first-round, five-game exit in 2020-21, at that — in Sheppard’s four-year tenure and the team hasn’t finished with a winning record in any of those seasons. Unseld, hired to replace Scott Brooks in July 2021, has been a disappointing 70-94 in two playoff-less seasons.
Sheppard told The Athletic recently that Unseld will return for another season. The winner of Sunday’s contest, however, wasn’t so lucky. Within minutes of Houston beating the Wizards, reports emerged that the Rockets plan to fire coach Stephen Silas on Monday — leaving the coach to answer questions about his soon-to-be-lost job.
“Obviously the result isn’t what I wanted it to be, but I’m walking out the door with my head held high,” said Silas, who went 59-177 in three seasons.
The Wizards, by contrast, don’t appear headed for any substantial change. Beyond Unseld, the bigger question is whether owner Ted Leonsis will look to move on from Sheppard. But the general manager, it should be noted, is scheduled to meet with reporters for a season-ending press conference Monday. On Mond
ay, Sheppard, Unseld and the players will all speak one by one in an attempt to digest how the season went wrong.
Their explanations won’t change the year from being a collective failure for those involved.
• Matthew Paras can be reached at mparas@washingtontimes.com.
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