Collapse Is a Process, Too: Notes from the Washington Wizards' Oblivion

Here's something that's almost certainly not a coincidence: less than 24 hours after his team calmly dispatched the desperate Washington Wizards, Warriors owner Joe Lacob had this to say about the rest of the NBA:

"We're light-years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in planning, in how we're going to go about things," he said. "We're going to be a handful for the rest of the NBA to deal with for a long time."

It's natural to feel this way after looking across the scorer's table and witnessing the organizational chaos and deep, baked-in dysfunction of the Wizards. In terms of structure, planning, and execution, the Warriors may or may not be light-years ahead of, say, the Spurs, or the Thunder, or (for that matter) the Celtics, but this much is indisputable: by simple dint of being virtually any team other than the Washington Wizards, they are, by default, light-years ahead of the Wizards.

It's telling that Lacob talks about structure and planning when assessing his organization's dominant position in the NBA: good teams and good organizations focus on the process. The Process as a concept has been dragged through the mud by its association with the egghead Sixers, who've humped The Process like no team in memory, mostly as a way of coaxing their fans into forgiving whole years of singularly awful basketball. But even the Sixers, to their credit, have a step-by-step plan in place for how they are going to be good in a lasting and meaningful way. The Celtics practice their process-focus at every level: while Danny Ainge is busy accumulating valuable future assets as part of a plan for building a sustainable juggernaut, Brad Stevens is calmly coaching his players to ignore makes and misses and turn their attention totally to the execution of a basketball game plan, as he has done going back to his Cinderella NCAA runs with Butler.

Now consider the Wizards: Ernie Grunfeld has been mostly a disaster as their general manager. Any reasonable process would look first for a coherent roster-building plan. The Wizards have never had one of those. Grunfeld gave one of the worst contracts in NBA history to Gilbert Arenas, and gave another to Andray Blatche. He eventually traded the Arenas albatross for the actual worst contract in NBA history, Rashard Lewis's $100 million stink bomb. He endeavored to rebuild the mostly underwhelming Arenas/Antawn Jamison/Caron Butler core by teaming Blatche with Nick Young and JaVale McGee and calling it the New Big Three. He selected Jan Vesely with the sixth pick of the 2011 NBA Draft, two spots before Kemba Walker and five before Klay Thompson. In his entire career as a NBA GM, which stretches back 27 years, Grunfeld has drafted one All-Star, in 2010: John Wall, who was the consensus No. 1 overall draft pick that year. He then set up Wall to be mentored by, of all people, Gilbert F. Arenas.

After the Wizards earned a low playoff seed in the historically atrocious Eastern Conference in 2013, Grunfeld was rewarded with a contract extension. This most mundane of catastrophic decisions might be the most representative of the current-era Wiz: rather than formulating a long-term strategy for success, the organization focused instead on cheap results.

Randy Wittman, similarly, has been a lousy NBA coach. His teams have always been known for playing a hopelessly outdated style of offense; the man himself made a reputation as an intractable blockhead for dismissing math as publicly and irritably as possible. But the team made the playoffs, and took down a desperately undermanned Bulls team one year and a Raptors squad famous for underperforming in the playoffs the next. Wittman, too, was rewarded with a contract extension.

This rewarding of what only barely works extends even to the floor: Wittman is notorious for yanking around the minutes available to young players, preferring to give playing time to the likes of Gary Neal and J.J. Hickson, the kind of player with which Grunfeld has ensured that the roster is reliably stocked: fringe NBA guys who manifestly cannot help a team achieve anything better than mediocrity. Young players like Kelly Oubre—who might someday grow into a good NBA player if he, you know, ever gets to play—are seemingly nailed to the bench for the kinds of mistakes that are an unavoidable part of developing a raw talent or, worse yet, for missing shots. All of Kevin Seraphin's playing time as a Wizard was predicated upon whether his most recent robotic drop-step jump-hook found the bottom of the net. Otto Porter's sophomore season was spent recoiling from the ball out of sheer terror that he'd be benched if he dared to take, and miss, a shot. Even runs of good performance often aren't enough to earn consistent playing time: Oubre was a respectable fill-in starter for nine games in December and January, shooting better than 50 percent from the arc in 23 minutes per game. He hasn't played more than 10 minutes in any game since January 20.

The result of all this is a team and organization that has no belief in, no expectation of, and no plan for anything other than mere adequacy. You could forgive all this hunkering down if the rewards were significant, but they're not, and they never have been. The Wizards were a lower-seeded playoff team in consecutive weak and thin Eastern Conference races. Now when the conference trends upward, they're an afterthought, a team without a playoff spot or a draft pick to look forward to, with an uncertain core of young players stagnating on a roster of one-year-contract cast-offs. The entirety of their plan for future success rests on a transformational talent voluntarily leaving more money, more success, and a vastly better organization to come play Randy Wittman's Jurassic basketball a half-empty Verizon Center.

Following their spirit-crushing loss to the even more dysfunctional Sacramento Kings Wednesday night, Bradley Beal had this to say about his team and teammates:

"We bark too much. We say what we need to do. We scream at one another. We can even try to blame Witt if we want to but at the end of the day we're still the ones playing. We still beat ourselves. We do dumb stuff on the floor like just not having a man in transition or not knowing where a guy is at half court or not knowing personnel. We just do dumb mental lapses that just mess up the game and end up hurting us in the long run. Everybody is a grown ass man, you either want to play or you don't."

This is what implosion looks like. Depending upon your view, this could be bad news: What does their future look like if guys are venting and calling each other out in postgame media scrums? That the Wizards have now reclaimed their birthright as Eastern Conference laughingstock is a result no one could have predicted at the start of the season.

And yet, as a NBA fan who looks around the league and envies the Warriors and the Spurs and the Thunder and the Raptors and the Hawks and the Celtics and, shit, even the goddamn Bucks? Who sees smart teams making forward-thinking moves to position themselves for long-term, sustainable success? Who has stared down the long dark tunnel of another contract extension for Grunfeld and another year, at least, of Wittman? Who frets over rooting for a team that dumps picks and stands pat in mediocrity for the chance at a golden ticket? For that person—for me—this implosion is itself part of a process, with long-overdue change as the increasingly likely outcome. And so, for once, for now, I get to root for the process. And you know what? It's bliss.