The Washington Wizards can cite repeated injuries as a reason they didn’t reach their potential this season.
However, they can’t point to injuries as the only reason they failed to make the NBA playoffs.
The Wizards — if they wanted to have a realistic shot at landing Kevin Durant in free agency — needed to create the distinct impression that they were closer to winning the Eastern Conference. Instead, they created the exact opposite idea: They’re going to have to work harder just to establish a place in the middle tier of the East. The fight for a conference championship has become exponentially more difficult.
It’s a genuine point of humilitation that the Wizards didn’t even make the playoffs this season, but the organization’s concerns run much deeper when considered in a larger context.
The Boston Celtics, with Brad Stevens, finished multiple playoff slots below the Wizards last season. Given the Celtics’ accumulation of draft picks and Stevens’s considerable talents as a coach, it’s clear that Boston has surpassed Washington in the East’s pecking order — not merely within the confines of this season, but for the next few years, barring a major power shift or some other game-changing occurrence. (More on that in a bit.)
The Atlanta Hawks, given the way they’ve dealt with the departure of DeMarre Carroll and the injury to Tiago Splitter, have in many ways impressed the NBA more in 2016 than they did in a 2015 season when everything broke their way. Mike Budenholzer offers every indication that he’ll be a top-10 coach in the league for the next several years. Atlanta has a brighter future than Washington does in the present tense.
Miami has an aging Dwyane Wade, and an unhealthy Chris Bosh, two pronounced limitations on the franchise’s ceiling. Even then, Erik Spoelstra’s cultivation of Justise Winslow, Josh Richardson, and Hassan Whiteside gives the Heat an exciting young nucleus for the long haul. These teams, plus Cleveland and Toronto, all send a message to the District of Columbia that winning the East is going to be extremely difficult in the near future. A year ago, the Wizards didn’t face nearly as many obstacles in their conference. They’ve lost ground in their own right, but also in relationship to several Eastern Conference teams.
Kevin Durant can’t look at the Wizards and feel particularly confident about a move to D.C. To that end, this season was a waste in Washington.
Now, the Wizards have to get 2017 right so that if Durant signs a one-year deal with Oklahoma City and waits until next year to make another — and more consequential –decision, Washington will be in position to make a credible sales pitch.
The way forward for the Wizards is clear on the most superficial level, but tricky on a granular level.
Obviously, Washington has to make multiple and significant changes. The increasingly old and less functional frontcourt tandem of Nene Hilario and Marcin Gortat has to be broken up. The Wizards surely can’t keep five other players (beyond Nene and Gortat) who will be 30 or older within the next year. This team isn’t bereft of youthful energy, but it’s carrying a lot of excess baggage, and the downturn taken this season should offer the perfect jumping off-point for portions of the bench, in addition to the Nene-Gortat combo.
Maybe the Wizards will keep one of Nene or Gortat, and maybe they’ll keep some members of the soon-to-be 30-and-older crowd, but they certainly have to shed multiple players, at least one in the core rotation.
With this in mind, the next question becomes the coach the Wizards choose for the pivotal 2017 season.
If Washington makes moderate tweaks to its roster, it will be easier to defend the idea of keeping Randy Wittman for one more go-round. Given how close the Wizards were to making the East Finals in each of the previous two seasons, this campaign could be viewed as an aberrational event, with Wittman getting a chance to get it right in 2017.
However, if the Wizards radically remake their roster, it would most likely represent an occasion in which to go in a new direction. Say what you want about Scott Brooks as a coach, but if wooing Durant and Russell Westbrook in the summer of 2017 is a goal, the idea of hiring Brooks would not be that bad an idea. Brooks didn’t do what needed to be done in Oklahoma City, but it’s not as though he’s a bad coach, and few would say he’d be a downgrade (or even a no-gain hire) relative to Wittman. If the Wizards made the East semifinals under Brooks in 2017, a Durant-Westbrook joint journey to D.C. the following July would not be a ludicrous notion. Maybe the Wizards need to go there with Brooks.
Other coaches — Tom Thibodeau, David Blatt, Lionel Hollins, just to name a few — offer legitimate (albeit debatable) alternatives, but other teams with playoff-caliber talent (quite probably Houston, and maybe Indiana) might have spots available before too long. The Wizards might need to act quickly on the coaching front, which would in turn mean they’d have to know where they want to go with their roster moves.
It will not be a dull summer in Washington this year. If the Wizards play their cards right, the summer of 2017 could be exciting for a very different set of reasons.
