The Wizards show AKME why they shouldn't tank: instead they should quit

there are levels to the bad

Let’s check in on Bulls-Wizards, part of the NBA CUP

(ripped from

Stephen Noh

)

Against the league’s worst defense, the Bulls put up a very good 121 ORtg. The Wizards also going against a bottom-five defense, but were without their best scorer and are the Wizards and put up a putrid offensive performance.

Bulls win by 19, putting their record at 8-11 which is tied for 9th worst in the league, and their net rating bumps to -5.0 which is in the same reverse-standing.

As I said in the game preview, the Wizards are what a true rebuild looks like, not the half-measure “competitive in every game” philosophy that Arturas Karnisovas espoused preseason and what has been deployed by Billy Donovan in terms of playing time.

In last night’s game¹ the Bulls weighted playing time age was 25.45 years, whereas the Wizards were at 24.38. If Poole (25.5 years old) played, it likely would’ve come at the expense of Malcolm Brogdon (32.0) and pushed that number even further down.

While a simply putrid viewing experience, the Wizards are in a better place organizationally than the Bulls. There are many levers to pull in a rebuild, and Washington is doing better:

1. Having a terrible season to improve your draft position, especially in a star-potential-filled draft like this one purports to be

2. Veterans who not only don’t help as much² but are on more tradeable contracts: Brogdon, Kyle Kuzma, Jonas Valanciunas.

3. Prospects that they’ve moved on from instead of doubling-down: Deni Avdija was traded last summer, Johnny Davis and Patrick Baldwin had their team options declined and are out of the rotation.

Altogether, while their present roster shows what it showed on Tuesday, their future is better. They have more and more high-upside prospects, plus additional draft picks (a lot of which coming from the Bradley Beal trade - which was mostly derided as “selling low” - in Summer 2023), AND a higher chance in this May’s lottery.

I find it incorrect to only focus on that last thing, and how much ‘better’ the Wizards are looking to be at tanking.

The Bulls are a relative failure at tanking. Though with flattened lottery odds and some luck so far this season, they’re likely “fine” and I’m not that worried.

But that they’re in a situation where tanking is so important, that is unique to the Bulls because their management has been so terrible. So wanting them to do tanking better is not the answer. Even if they did have the self awareness to realize it, they wouldn’t be good at it. Their plan, such that we can decipher it, of “young players with experience” and showcasing players with onerous contracts isn’t working. That makes sense, because as leaders of this organization they’ve proven to be not good at anything!

The answer, as always, is to replace the front office. That can be considered unreasonable, but it’s also unreasonable to think you can out-stink the Washington Wizards. And while they’re historically stinky too, the biggest difference in the two franchises is that their current regime is a different one than the predecessors that created the mess. Nobody should want AKME to be given runway to clean up their own mess.

1. removing back-end playing time for both teams, the Wizards started that earlier than the Bulls, who were looking to add to their point differential in The NBA Cup

2. On the one hand, nobody could reasonably expect Vuc would play like an All-Star again. But on the other, AK is unreasonable when it comes to Vuc so he likely did.