Are the 2025 Wizards the worst team in NBA history?

It’s the All-Star break, and the Washington Wizards are currently trudging through one of the worst seasons in NBA history. Their 9-45 record, supremely buoyed by an inexplicable recent three-game win streak, puts them on pace for about 13 or 14 wins on the season. That would be the worst in the NBA since the infamous “Process” Philadelphia 76ers.

For much of the season, the Wizards’ ineptitude has drawn comparisons to a hallowed historic NBA team, one of my favorite teams ever to discuss: the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats.

The 2012 Bobcats hold the “record” for fewest wins in NBA history — they stumbled to just seven in the 66-game lockout-shortened 2011-12 season. That 7-59 record translates to a .106 winning percentage, also the worst in NBA history.

What better way to make the most out of covering a terrible team than by lining them up against the gold standard of all sitting ducks? Today I’m comparing the 2025 Washington Wizards against the 2012 Charlotte Bobcats to see who really deserves the title of “worst team in NBA history.”

First, let’s set the scene for each team.

2024-25 Wizards

Still licking their wounds after a decade-plus of gross organizational mismanagement, the Wizards entered the 2024-25 NBA season with minimal aspirations beyond youth development and acquisition of Duke’s Cooper Flagg.

Their best player this season has been Jordan Poole, who’s averaging 21.2 points per game on fine enough efficiency. Poole is currently living out the second of his two NBA destinies. He won a ring with the Golden State Warriors in 2022 as a supercharged sixth man, and now he’s an effective tank commander leading the Wizards deep into the lottery while giving the fans someone to rally behind.

Washington’s most important players, however, are second-year forward Bilal Couibaly and the three rookies: Alex Sarr, Bub Carrington, and Kyshawn George. Coulibaly’s offensive game is still a work in progress, but he’s been throwing down some nasty jams in transition all season, including one over French national teammate Victor Wembanyama.

In one of the worst drafts in recent NBA history, the Wizards should be applauded for finding three studs in Sarr, Carrington, and George. Carrington and Sarr are both top 10 in scoring among rookies, and George is not far behind them in 13th.

2011-12 Bobcats

The 2012 Charlotte Bobcats are more than just a team. They’re an institution, a navigational pillar in the history of this beautiful sport. Anyone seeking to chronicle the story of the NBA (or even of basketball as a whole) simply must cross paths with the 2012 Bobcats.

This team was the last bastion of a bygone era in NBA history, when the broader context of the sport allowed for teams to be built the way Charlotte indefensibly decided to build its team. A year later, when the Philadelphia 76ers traded away Jrue Holiday and began “The Process,” the geometry of roster construction tilted, and tanking (which had always existed) became the default setting for uncompetitive teams.

Gone now are teams like the 2012 Bobcats, who were not built to lose like the bad teams of today are. They were simply a product of some cocktail of bewildering incompetence and flagrant apathy. Each of their games was already a blowout during pregame warmups, and the team doctors didn’t even need to diagnose any phantom injuries to shave excess wins.

I was unfortunately preoccupied with third grade during the 2011-12 NBA season, so I was not graced with the misfortune of watching the Bobcats with my own eyes. I’ll do my best to summarize their tortured existence from what I’ve been able to gather.

The 2011 Bobcats went 34-48 and missed the playoffs by three games. During the season, they traded second-leading scorer Gerald Wallace, and after the season they traded leading scorer Stephen Jackson. That left Gerald Henderson and a dangerously-close-to-retirement Corey Maggette as the 2012 team’s leading scorers at 15.1 and 15.0 points per game, respectively.

The Bobcats won their first game of the season and then never even caught a whiff of .500 again. At the All-Star break they were drowning in a 4-28 record, and their last win of the season came just a few weeks later on Mar. 17. They ended the season by losing 23 straight, still the sixth-longest losing streak in NBA history, and they finished 7-59.

Looking back on this roster in the year 2025 frankly makes my head spin. Poor Kemba Walker nailed one of the greatest shots in college basketball history only to wind up on the Bobcats mere months later, where he would play all 66 games and have his name soldered to the most undesirable record in NBA history.

As someone who began really following the NBA in the mid-to-late 2010s (again, I was in third grade in 2012), Walker is the first name that jumps off the page to me. I think of Walker as an All-Star who quickly fell out of the NBA due to injuries, spent a season in the EuroLeague with AS Monaco, and was forced to retire prematurely. 

It’s easy to forget Walker spent the first half-decade of his career toiling away on some terrible Bobcats/Hornets teams before blossoming into an All-Star in 2017. Back in 2012, he was merely a pretty good rookie tasked with shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak. Walker posted 12 points per game on some admittedly ghastly shooting splits and missed out on All-Rookie honors.

Boris Diaw also spent the bulk of the season as a Bobcat, posting 7.4 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 4.3 assists as the team’s ridiculously unmotivated power forward. Diaw wanted out, and he was finally granted a buyout toward the end of the season. Diaw signed with the San Antonio Spurs, where he went on to become a crucial part of the team’s 2014 championship squad.

A couple other names worth mentioning are D.J. Augustin, who last played for the Los Angeles Lakers in 2022 and Byron Mullens, who last played in the NBA in 2014 but has hooped everywhere from Japan to Canada to Iran since. He currently plays for the BCH Knights in Mongolia.

Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention the only 2012 Bobcat who is still in the NBA: Bismack Biyombo. In 2012, Biyombo was a 19-year-old rookie who posted averages of 5.2 points and 5.8 rebounds per game. Today, he’s on a ten-day contract with the San Antonio Spurs.

Nothing ever can do the 2012 ‘Cats justice like Secret Base’s documentary “The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts.” I highly recommend checking that out after finishing this article.

Now that we’ve set the stage, who would actually win if these two teams squared up against each other?

Offense

Don’t get it twisted — this is NOT a display of offensive firepower. Both the Bobcats (95.2) and Wizards (106.6) possessed the worst offensive ratings in their respective seasons. The Wizards rank 27th in the league this season in points per game at 108.6, while the Bobcats ranked dead last with… 87.0. Ohhhhhh boy.

Jordan Poole is a solid shot creator. Do those shots always go in? Well, no. But as a shot creator he is leagues beyond anyone on the 2012 ‘Cats. D.J. Augustin and rookie Kemba Walker were the Bobcats’ best creators, but they both shot well south of 40% from the field. Gerald Henderson, who scored 15 points on 13 shots per game (basically all twos), was the Bobcats’ main offensive option.

The Wizards really have three shooters who need to be respected. Justin Champagnie (38.5%), Poole (37.1%), and Corey Kispert (36.3%) are all good shooters either currently or reputationally (in Kispert’s case). Malcolm Brogdon is also typically a decent low-to-middle volume three-point shooter who is mired in the worst shooting season of his career (on a career-low in attempts, I should note). 

Only seven Bobcats attempted one or more threes per game, and as a team Charlotte made just 29.5% of their 13.5 attempts per game. Compare that to 33.4% on 13.5 attempts per game for the Wizards and it becomes abundantly clear which of the two teams had an easier time putting points on the board.

Of course the Wizards attempt many more threes, as the game has obviously evolved to emphasize a much greater deal of floor spacing. You would be absolutely wrong to assume the Bobcats have any sort of an edge inside the three-point arc, however. 

One lone Bobcat, Derrick Brown, made over half of his twos in 2011-12. Compare that to five-plus (depending on how you qualify players based on minutes played) Wizards in 2025 who make over half their twos and the true scope of Charlotte’s offensive ineptitude becomes clear.

People can romanticize post-up basketball and bemoan the three-point heavy style of today all they want. The truth is that there were always teams like the Bobcats who merely haphazardly launched ugly twos with no regard for floor spacing.

Point Wizards.

Before we move on, please take a look at this Bobcats highlight tape put together by YouTube user LamarMatic, set to a Phil Collins song. I can’t stop watching it.

Defense

There’s limited tape out there that I’ve been able to find of the 2012 Bobcats’ defense. I found a YouTube video posted by the NBA after the season titled “Charlotte Bobcats Top 10 Plays of the 2012 Season,” and it’s mostly mildly impressive dunks in traffic with a few highlight blocks sprinkled in. 

Biyombo has been a great rim protector throughout his career, and I was surprised to find he averaged 1.8 blocks per game that season, good for eighth in the NBA. Tyrus Thomas also swatted a shot and change per game.

Charlotte allowed 100.9 points per game, which was fourth-worst in the NBA that season but would have been comfortably first this season. Before you embark on your “nobody plays defense anymore” tirade, please consider that Kemba Walker and D.J. Augustin, two sub-six foot traffic cones for their entire careers, were the ones primarily tasked with guarding the other teams’ point guards. 

Also to consider: the Bobcats’ 10-point swing between their opponents' points per game (100.9) and their defensive rating (110.4). This discrepancy indicates that while 100.9 points per game would be an indicator of a lockdown defense today, it fails to consider the dramatically slowed down pace of the game thirteen years ago. Relative to the rest of the NBA at the time, the ‘Cats were mere training dummies on defense.

Speaking of traffic cones, the Wizards allow 122.0 points per game, the worst figure in the NBA. Their 119.8 defensive rating (also league-worst) accurately captures their defensive woes — they just get whooped up and down the court at breakneck speed.

The single best defensive player among these two teams is easily Bilal Coulibaly. Coulibaly is a legitimately impactful defender in the NBA who can clamp down the perimeter and is even able to guard up a bit of size. Biyombo was more of a formidable rim protector in later seasons for the Bobcats/Hornets, but in 2012 he was still a threat to block any of the unlimited looks at the rim teams threw at the ‘Cats.

I’m giving the defensive edge here to the Wizards. To me, slightly better rim protection on Charlotte’s end is virtually meaningless when the other team was routinely gifted a layup line every single game.

That’s not to say the Wizards are a particularly formidable defense in any way, shape, or form. I just think Coulibaly’s value on the defensive end wipes the floor with anything the Bobcats could possibly throw out there.

Point Wizards. 

Who did they beat?

Five of the Wizards’ nine wins have come against the Atlanta Hawks and Charlotte Hornets (man, they can’t catch a break). They did beat two playoff-caliber teams, though — the Anthony Edwards-less Minnesota Timberwolves and the Denver Nuggets.

That Nuggets game was one of the most shocking NBA results I’ve ever witnessed live. The Wizards snapped a 16-game losing streak by weathering a 56-point explosion from potential MVP Nikola Jokic, plus a double-double without points from Russell Westbrook.

The Bobcats, meanwhile, picked up wins over the Carmelo Anthony/Amar’e Stoudemire Knicks and the recent East champion Orlando Magic with Dwight Howard. They also beat the Raptors led by a young DeMar DeRozan twice and grabbed a win over rookie Klay Thompson. The best player from the remaining teams they beat was probably Andrew Bogut.

The win over the Nuggets in one of Jokic’s best career games alone gives the edge here to the Wizards once again.

Who would win if they played?

So now the burning question on everyone’s minds: what would happen if the 2012 Bobcats and 2025 Wizards played in a seven-game series?

For the purposes of this thought exercise, I’ll be boiling each team down to its most prolific five-man lineup, along with their next two players up in terms of minutes played per game. I’ll also give some light consideration to the deep bench, but we’ll really be splitting hairs at that point.

I’m including Kyle Kuzma and Boris Diaw in this exercise, both of whom finished their respective seasons on different teams but played enough on their previous teams to warrant inclusion.

The Wizards’ most-used five-man lineup this season consists of Bub Carrington, Bilal Coulibaly, Kyle Kuzma, Jordan Poole, and Alex Sarr, with Corey Kispert and Kyshawn George as the next two players up. 

For the Bobcats, it’s D.J. Augustin, Bismack Biyombo, Gerald Henderson, Corey Maggette, and Tyrus Thomas, with Boris Diaw and Kemba Walker coming in off the bench. 

I simply think the Wizards are too athletic for these Bobcats to contain. Only Kemba Walker, who, remember, was a rookie, even compares athletically to the Wizards’ starting five. I expect the Wizards to run laps around this slow, plodding Charlotte team, and Washington would enjoy a feast of biblical proportions in the open court. 

There would be no shortage of transition opportunities, either. The Bobcats were a nightly seminar in brick-laying, and just from the game footage I’ve been able to find on YouTube, they had a marvelous propensity to miss three-foot spinning jump hooks. A seven-game series against the Bobcats would amount to a summer camp for Alex Sarr to work on his outlet passing.

No matter how bad this season’s Wizards team may be, they stylistically have every advantage in the world over the Bobcats. They’re far more athletic, overall more talented, and, worst comes to worst, they can sic Bilal Coulibaly on any of the four Bobcats (Henderson, Maggette, Walker, Augustin) capable in theory of hitting a wide-open jumper. 

I ultimately think the Wizards would sweep the Bobcats in four convincing blowouts. That’s a testament both to how much the game has grown in the past 13 years and to how terrible the 2012 Bobcats truly were.  

Conclusions

The 2012 Bobcats represent everything that the NBA today is not: they were slow, they chucked up midrange jumpers, and the franchise was so rudderless that the basketball gods withheld the first overall pick (Anthony Davis) and gave it to the franchise that had left their city a decade prior (the New Orleans Hornets).

Those very Bobcats also serve as a refreshing reminder that the Wizards’ season could be so much worse. Sure, at times they can be the laughing stock of the NBA, but these Washington Wizards aren’t so bad as to be remembered a decade-plus down the line. They’re merely one of the many bad teams across the sport’s history that’s wound up winning a handful more games than those 2012 Bobcats.

The Wizards, for all intents and purposes, are one of the worst teams in NBA history. But at the All-Star break, they’re already north of the Bobcats’ record-low winning percentage.

All hail the 2012 Charlotte Bobcats.