What’s the Washington Wizards’ plan? There could be some ‘Thunder’ on the horizon

LAS VEGAS — When the Washington Wizards traded Bradley Beal and Kristaps Porziņģis several weeks ago, it appeared the team’s new decision-makers intended to transform the franchise’s direction completely.

Executives from at least some rival teams expected new Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger and new Wizards general manager Will Dawkins to tear the rest of the team apart and position a stripped-down roster to lose games. Jettisoning Beal and Porziņģis heralded the start of a long-overdue total rebuild, or so it seemed.

In actuality, the Wizards’ plan is more complicated.

Although a dramatic shift has started, Washington may be as many as two seasons away from going into “full-rebuild” mode, if it gets there at all, said league sources who were granted anonymity to discuss the organization’s plans more freely.

Team officials are said to regard the upcoming 2023-24 season, and perhaps also the 2024-25 season, as something akin to a rejuvenation period for the organization: a time for the players and the basketball operations staff to regain some of the momentum, accountability, competitiveness and, above all else, the joy that had evaporated in recent years. It’s a time to rebuild the culture, which deteriorated during the flawed plan to build around Beal and after moves that backfired.

The decision to re-sign Kyle Kuzma appears more logical when seen through that lens.

In theory, Kuzma should help Washington win games and, in the process, hurt the team’s odds for the 2024 NBA Draft Lottery. In that sense, re-signing him is counterintuitive, because Washington almost certainly will need to build through the draft for the foreseeable future. But for the time being, Winger and Dawkins value improving the culture more than piling up losses. Kuzma is not a perfect player, but he has a track record of durability and playing hard, and he should help the Wizards be more competitive.

Re-signing Kuzma should bring other benefits. Retaining him now keeps alive the possibility of the Wizards trading him in the future and receiving players and valuable future draft picks in return. In addition, a trio of Kuzma and guards Tyus Jones and Jordan Poole should help the development of first-round pick Bilal Coulibaly, because Coulibaly can build his game piece-by-piece rather than worry right now about carrying any scoring load.

It also helps that the 2024 NBA Draft class is thought to be much weaker than this year’s draft. The absence of any prospect on par with Victor Wembanyama or Scoot Henderson diminishes the incentive for teams to race toward the bottom of the league standings.

Washington’s intention not to bottom out right now can be described through a simple cost-benefit analysis. The drawbacks of starting a complete teardown now ­— hurting the development of Coulibaly and Deni Avdija, among others, and perpetuating a culture that accepts mediocrity — might outweigh the potential benefits of having the best lottery odds for a relatively weak draft class.

The plan involves risk. Rebuilds sometimes sputter because a team just barely misses out on someone who could have become a franchise cornerstone. The better a rebuilding team does in the league standings, the more likely it is to draft fourth instead of third, fifth instead of fourth and so on. In 2020, that meant the difference between having to choose Patrick Williams at No. 4 instead of LaMelo Ball at No. 3. In 2021, that was the difference between settling for Jalen Suggs at fifth overall instead of picking Scottie Barnes fourth overall.

A Wizards team with Kuzma, Poole and Jones forming its core in the short term, with good depth options such as Danilo Gallinari, Landry Shamet, Delon Wright and Avdija, almost certainly will enter most games as underdogs, anyway. Although it’s possible the Wizards could exceed 30 wins and hurt their lottery odds, they also could finish with 25 or fewer victories.

The intention, though, is to have a group of players who won’t accept losing all those games — a team that, if it’s down 20 points late in the fourth quarter, for example, at least will feature players who’ll dive on the floor for loose balls. In time, the Wizards could repair the culture that has fallen into disrepair in recent years.

Generally speaking, there are three avenues to rebuild a team: through the draft, trades or free agency.

At this moment, Washington doesn’t have the highly coveted young players and stocked cupboard of first-round picks to land a top-tier superstar through a trade. Indeed, it’s possible that Winger surveyed the values of players who were already on the roster and determined that they wouldn’t bring back enough in trades right now.

Building through free agency also isn’t an option now. Even when the Wizards had a chance to compete in recent decades, the team struggled to lure top-level players.

That leaves the draft, and then developing those players well.

And that’s why it’s possible, and probably likely, that once the team builds a positive culture and generates some momentum internally that it will take a clearer direction, and bottom out more completely, perhaps for the 2025-26 season. The 2026 NBA Draft, barring reclassifications, already boasts two elite prospects: 6-foot-9 forward Cameron Boozer and 6-foot-8 forward Cooper Flagg. Boozer and Flagg are players worth bottoming out for.

The Wizards’ rough plan — to compete for at least the 2023-24 season, leaving open the possibility of bottoming out after that — resembles the path the Oklahoma City Thunder took after the Thunder traded Paul George and Russell Westbrook during the 2019 offseason.

Rather than immediately rerouting Chris Paul, who arrived from Houston in the Westbrook trade, the Thunder kept Paul and paired him with Steven Adams, Dennis Schröder and Gallinari. With Paul as the team’s heartbeat and those solid veterans, the Thunder started to develop second-year guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and rookie swingman Luguentz Dort. That Oklahoma City team surpassed all reasonable expectations, going 44-28 and reaching the first round of the playoffs.

During the 2020 offseason, the Thunder traded Paul, Schröder and Adams, accumulating draft capital and positioning the roster to bottom out in the years ahead. The Thunder posted a 22-50 record in 2020-21, helping them draft Josh Giddey sixth in 2021, and a 24-58 record in 2021-22, helping them draft Chet Holmgren second in 2022.

Thanks to all those far-sighted trades, and solidifying a culture during the 2020-21 season, the Thunder now have one of the league’s most promising futures.

One of the architects of that plan was none other than Dawkins, who was a high-ranking Thunder executive and now is a key architect of the Wizards’ rebuild.

—The Athletic’s Andrew Schlecht contributed to this report.

(Top photo of Will Dawkins and Michael Winger: Craig Hudson / The Washington Post via Getty Images)