The Wizards have won 15, 18, and 17 games over the last three seasons. Last season, 55 percent of their total minutes went to rookies or second-year players, the highest share in the league, which is a polite way of saying this was a team built almost entirely out of players still learning the job. That's the starting point for a case that, on its face, sounds ridiculous: Washington is actually worth paying attention to this season, and not as a lottery curiosity.
Here's what three years of losing actually bought them, and it's worth being precise about when each piece actually arrived. Trae Young came over from Atlanta in a January trade for CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert, giving Washington its first real table-setter in a decade, a point guard who creates clean catch-and-shoot looks for shooters and a two-man game for a big man, neither of which this roster has ever had. He locked it in this offseason with a four-year, $212 million extension. Three weeks after the Young trade, Anthony Davis came over from Dallas in a three-team deal. Then, this summer, the front office kept building: Khris Middleton, a three-time All-Star wing, rejoined Washington through a six-team sign-and-trade for depth and shot creation on the perimeter, and Deandre Ayton, a former No. 1 overall pick in his own right, arrived from the Lakers to anchor the frontcourt. In June, Washington won the draft lottery outright and took BYU's AJ Dybantsa with the top pick, the franchise's first No. 1 selection since John Wall in 2010.
The part that makes this more than a star-collecting exercise is that the young core these veterans are walking into already has real production attached to it, not just potential. Alex Sarr, a true seven-footer, jumped to 16.3 points, 7.4 rebounds, and 2.0 blocks a game in his second season, exactly the kind of rim-protecting, floor-spacing center who benefits most from a point guard who can actually find him. Kyshawn George shot 38.1 percent from three while averaging 14.8 points as a 24th overall pick, well above what that draft slot usually produces. Tre Johnson, last year's No. 6 pick, scored 12.2 points a game as a rookie on 35.8 percent shooting from deep. None of that is empty box-score filler accumulated on a bad team. It's a young core that performed above its draft position before it ever had a real offensive engine running the show.
Dybantsa is the other half of the bet, and it's a real bet, not a sure thing. At 6-foot-9, with a wingspan unofficially reported in the 7-foot range, he led the country in scoring at BYU, averaging 25.5 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 3.7 assists on 51 percent shooting, and dropped 40 on Kansas State in the Big 12 Tournament, breaking a freshman scoring record that had belonged to Kevin Durant. His own college coach has compared his defense to Paul George's, and Dybantsa himself points to Tracy McGrady as a stylistic touchstone, the kind of comparisons that mean something and mean nothing until he's done it in the league. He's also an inconsistent outside shooter who leans on pull-ups over catch-and-shoot opportunities, and his defensive effort has been inconsistent against lesser competition than he's about to see every night. The last player this franchise took with a top pick, John Wall, made five All-Star teams. That's the range of outcomes Washington is actually betting on here, not a guarantee, a real range.
It's worth being honest about the other side of this, too. Davis still hasn't played a single game for Washington. He was already sidelined with a hand ligament injury when the trade went through in February, and further setbacks kept pushing the debut back the rest of the season. He turns 34 in March, with a long injury history of his own. Young's defense has been a real weakness everywhere he's played, and pairing him with Sarr and Bilal Coulibaly on the back line is a plan, not a proven answer. This isn't a team built to contend for a title this season, and nobody in Washington is pretending otherwise.
What it is, for the first time in three years, is a team with an actual identity and a reason to watch it play out: a genuine lead guard, a seven-footer who can already protect the rim and knock down a jumper, shooters on the wing who've already outproduced their draft slots, and a former No. 1 pick learning the league in real time. The losing bought them the attempt. Whether it was worth it is the kind of question you can only answer by watching the season, which, for the first time since Wall left, is actually worth doing.