Grading the Washington Wizards’ 2022-’23 season so far

This season has been interesting for the Washington Wizards. They have had plenty of great runs, both by individual players and as a team. They have also had great runs on offense and on defense as well. However, they can’t seem to find any consistency as they are either middle of the pack or bottom of the league in just about every metric.

This set back is not due to a lack of talent. The Wizards are one of the best teams in the league when it comes to just pure basketball talent on the roster. They just lack discipline, chemistry, and any sort of effective game plan.

While many have used the injury explanation, the Wizards have been far healthier than many other teams that are in a better position than they are. Considering the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers are both still winning games and so are the Golden State Warriors, it just feels weak applying that argument to the Wiz.

There are far better explanations for why the Washington Wizards record is what it is.

The Wizards have had a few things go wrong for them this season. That much is clear at least. What’s not clear is why they have allowed the bleeding to continue for so long?

What it boils down to is a lack of discipline by everybody involved. We hear about it all the time when it comes to players not playing defense or committing bad fouls. We rarely hear the term when it comes to coaching and executive staff. However, this is the Wizards, and they don’t like doing things the way most teams would.

The front office should have recognized that what they were running wasn’t going to work and trading your leading scorer off the bench for practically nothing in favor of a non-scorer wasn’t enough to push them over the hump. they could have done far more at the trade deadline to improve the roster and also could have improved the assistant coaching staff as well. Instead, they made one move and it made the team worse.

The coaching staff should have made adjustments months ago. The defense is lazy for most of the game and the offense is predictable. Many of the issues with the gameplan are fixable but it requires the discipline of the entire coaching staff to recognize the issue and address it. This hasn’t happened for the Wizards this season.

The players have also struggled to build any sort of identity as a team throughout the season. We have seen more on-court chemistry between James Wiseman and Jaden Ivey in their eight games together than any two players on the Wizards have at all this season. The only exception was that week and a half when the offense ran through Deni Avdija, but he cooled down quickly and has not been able to recapture that magic.

It has been an all-around effort from the franchise to make the team be so underwhelming. No one person or group within the organization is at fault for this year.

Overall, this season has been nothing short of a complete and utter failure for the Washington Wizards and it really stains the potential legacy of every player or staff that was involved in the creation of this roster. This team had plenty of potential and high expectations and just couldn’t live up to any of it.

Final grading: F-