Bum-Ass Franchise Wins Last-Ditch Pot Of Gold After Years Of Self-Exile

Michael Winger, president of Monumental Basketball, the Ted Leonsis-owned management company that runs the Wizards, reportedly told third-tier hoops scoopster Jake Fischer Sunday night that his front office will at least consider trading the pick, as they do not view their lottery windfall as a savior moment. The Wizards arrived at this moment by being very bad at basketball. They lost 80 percent of their games this regular season, their third consecutive season with fewer than 20 wins. This one Wizards squad, more or less, is responsible for two of the three seasons in NBA history when a team allowed more than 10,000 total points while scoring fewer than 9,500; per Statmuse, Washington's minus-982 from this regular season is the fourth-worst point-differential in history. The Wizards have not been good—not in any serious way—since 1979, but these recent campaigns have been particularly gruesome, and represent the cynical nadir of a period of total basketball irrelevance. This season the Wizards had losing streaks of nine, 10, 14, and 16 games, and had winning streaks of two, two, two, and two. From Dec. 26 to Jan. 6 the team unexpectedly won five of seven behind the steady stewardship of veteran guard C.J. McCollum. The next day, on Jan. 7, they traded McCollum and reserve Corey Kispert to the Atlanta Hawks, for Trae Young, whose asset value, distressed by a huge contract, a difficult professional reputation, and a team that plainly did not need him, was at its all-time low. The point was to lose: Following the trade, the Wizards dropped nine in a row. Even that was not enough to push them clear of a large pack of NBA teams that also spent the back half of this season trying to lose. Contorting its roster into hilarious shapes and de-powering itself outrageously, the team finally managed to lose 26 of its final 27 games. Despite all of this, the Wizards finished just two games below the second-worst team in the standings, and just five games worse than the fifth worst.