The Wizards’ Make-or-Break Moment Has Arrived

To be a Washington Wizards fan is to understand, at a bone-deep, cellular level, that your faith and fandom will forever be repaid in pain. It’s not just the losing — the 48-year title drought, these last eight consecutive sub-.500 seasons, the staggering 196 losses over the past three campaigns — but the accompanying small humiliations that suck the soul from one’s being and the foundational failures that can make it feel permanent.

This is a franchise that hasn’t won a playoff series in nearly a decade; that since moving to D.C. from Baltimore in 1973 has produced just four homegrown all-stars; that over the past three seasons has strung together as many losing streaks of 14 games or more (five) as the rest of the NBA combined; that arguably hasn’t featured a generational, Hall-of-Fame-type talent in the prime of their career since Wes Unseld a half-century ago.

So Wizards fans can be forgiven for viewing Tuesday night’s long-awaited windfall — the team’s selection of forward AJ Dybantsa with the first overall pick of the NBA draft — not as an epochal turning point for a franchise on the rise, as it might be regarded elsewhere, but as just another trap door to fall through, dooming them to another generation of suckitude.

As this was a draft without a clear-cut, slam-dunk top choice, the way Victor Wembanyama was in 2023 or Cooper Flagg was in 2025, it probably will be years before anyone knows whether the Wizards made the right pick in Dybantsa, a physical, 6-foot-9 dynamo who led the nation in scoring last season for BYU and who has both the game and the natural magnetism to be a superstar in the NBA for a long time.

But after everything this franchise and its beleaguered, bedraggled fan base have been through, it’s not a choice this front office can afford to get wrong.

Wizards fans, many of whom still remember the 2001 top pick squandered on all-time draft-bust Kwame Brown, come by their glass-half-emptiness honestly and organically. So it is only natural for them to view this pick not through the lens of how Dybantsa will transform their franchise, but how Darryn Peterson and Cameron Boozer — the two other players the Wizards were believed to have considered with the top pick — will go on to transform their own franchises, while the Wizards continue to sputter and smoke.

But we are here today to tell you: It’s OK to believe in the Wizards again. Truly.

At the very least, the front-office braintrust that has been running the franchise’s basketball operations since 2023 — team president Michael Winger and general manager Will Dawkins, both products of Sam Presti’s Oklahoma City Thunder player-development juggernaut — have earned, no matter how difficult it is for a Wizards fan to grant it, the benefit of the doubt.

For the past three seasons, with the blessing of owner Ted Leonsis, Winger and Dawkins have overseen a wholescale teardown of the Wizards’ roster. Their preferred term for the process is “deconstruction” – which, granted, sounds better than “gutting,” “demolition” or, heaven forbid, “tank job” – but no matter the terminology, the mission was undertaken with transparency and brutal efficiency: lose games by the dozen while stockpiling draft picks (including the No. 2, No. 6 and No. 1 overall picks in the past three drafts) and young talent. (The Wizards and a handful of other teams, in fact, were so good at tanking that the NBA recently changed the rules regarding the draft lottery for future seasons in an effort to prevent it.)

“It’s our fans [who] have endured the most,” Winger told reporters on the night last month when the Wizard won the NBA Draft Lottery to secure the No. 1 overall pick. “And to me, this No. 1 pick is for them, [as] a reward for hanging in there with us [and for continuing] to support us despite some really bad basketball.”

But suddenly, even the most jaded Wizards fans — is there any other kind? — can look at this roster and see the makings of a future contender, perhaps even (dare we say?) a 2026-27 playoff team.

Dybantsa joins a talented young core that already includes center Alex Sarr, forwards Will Riley and Kyshawn George and guards Tre Johnson, Bub Carrington and Bilal Coulibaly. And underpinning that group are veteran all-stars Trae Young and Anthony Davis, acquired earlier this year in moves that signaled the front office’s belief the rebuild was preparing to turn a corner — and whose combined presence means the Wizards won’t have to run their 2026-27 offense through Dybantsa.

“The Wizards’ train is starting to leave the station,” Dawkins told reporters at the end of last season, remarks that would have gotten a Wizards GM laughed out of the room at any other point in the past decade or so.

When was the last time the Wizards projected anything resembling true, unfettered optimism? There are any number of acceptable responses, but we will go with halftime of Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals on May 15, 2017, in Boston. John Wall’s Wizards, having already dispatched the Atlanta Hawks in the first round and then played the Boston Celtics to a draw across the first six games, led Game 7 by a bucket at halftime and were 24 minutes away from advancing to the franchise’s first NBA Finals since 1979.

But the Celtics dominated the third quarter and went on to win by 10. The Wizards have not won a playoff series since. Wall would never make it through another healthy season. The Wizards’ 464 losses beginning in 2017-18 are the most in the NBA in that span, 30 more than Detroit.

In fact, Wall’s career in Washington, where he was the franchise’s last No. 1 overall pick prior to Tuesday, provides a useful thought experiment for where the Wizards sit today.

Wall, the top prize of the 2010 draft class, played parts of nine seasons for the Wizards, averaged 19.0 points and 9.2 assists during that stretch, was runner-up for rookie of the year, made five all-star teams, and took the Wizards to the playoffs four times and to the Eastern Conference semis in three of them before injuries did him in.

If given the choice, would you take Wall’s career arc for Dybantsa before the latter even suits up for his first NBA game? The accumulated trauma of the franchise’s recent history — not to mention the example of 2001 top pick Brown, who averaged 6.6 points per game for his career — might make you consider it.

But it’s also permissible to dream bigger, to hold the franchise to the promise Winger made when he was introduced as team president in 2023: “The eventual expectation is we’re going to build a generational talent,” he said then. “... Eventually, we’re gonna hoist a trophy here in D.C.”

If Dybantsa becomes everything the Wizards’ braintrust (and plenty of outside talent evaluators) thinks he will become, this could indeed be the start of a new era at Capital One Arena. (Surely, if the New York Knicks can win an NBA title, the Wizards can.)

And if he doesn’t? If he gets hurt, or flames out, or merely underachieves relative to Peterson and/or Boozer? It won’t feel like devastation or misery. More like resigned hopelessness. It is — and has been for generations — the Wizards fan’s natural state.