Since the 2025 trade deadline, the Washington Wizards have assembled a collection of players that look primed to take over the NBA...if the year was 2019.
Khris Middleton, Marcus Smart, and CJ McCollum are all still moderately positive-value players entering the twilights of their respective careers, but the Wizards are simply demonstrating a good sense of how to rebuild by acquiring them.
I almost feel bad at this point constantly ragging on the Charlotte Hornets, but their “strategy” for rebuilding is the exact trap the Wizards are successfully avoiding falling into. Perpetually sucking to earn years of successive high draft picks has never yielded a serious team in the NBA.
There was a point at which the Philadelphia 76ers looked to be rewriting the manual on rebuilding with that aforementioned strategy, but today they find themselves in one of the worst situations across the entire league with nary a Conference Final appearance to show for it.
Instead of compiling a college dorm of teenage prospects, the Wizards are finding the young guys they like and surrounding them with competent veterans who they can spend some time playing with and learning from.
All three of the Wizards’ chosen oldheads have spent the past decade cutting their teeth on some seriously competitive teams.
Middleton was the second or third best player on the 2021 champion Milwaukee Bucks, and his decade of service in Cream City (ew, sorry about that) warrants a jersey retirement at the very least.
Smart may have come the most tantalizingly close to winning a championship out of every active ringless player, and his Celtics teams were perennial Conference Finals participants. The number of high-pressure playoff games under Smart’s belt is greater than many teams combined, the Wizards included.
McCollum is one of the smartest and most widely-respected players across the NBA, and while the closest he’s ever come to a championship was getting moonwalked by the Golden State Warriors in the 2019 Western Conference Finals, his decade of borderline All-Star play will prove an invaluable resource for this young Wizards squad.
Keeping these three around, at least for a little bit, demonstrates that the Wizards’ front office truly has its finger on the pulse for how teams rebuild nowadays. Rolling out a ball for a bunch of guys nobody’s ever heard of is no longer the pre-eminent rebuilding strategy.
Instead, pragmatic transactions and veteran leadership are the wave of the future. Teams like the Houston Rockets, Indiana Pacers, Minnesota Timberwolves, and Detroit Pistons demonstrated the value of such a philosophy this past season, and the Wizards could be one of the next teams to make that very same jump.