I almost feel bad writing this. I’ve actually enjoyed watching this year’s Wizards team more than any of the previous few years’ squads — and by a lot. The young guys aren’t actually good yet, but they at least appear to know what they’re doing, which is a nice change of pace.
But man this team is B-A-D. Like, historically bad.
They have lost 15 consecutive games and their record now stands at 6-40, which puts them on a 10.7-win pace over the course of 82 games. You can’t win seven-tenths of a game, so we’ll call it 11 wins. That would make them tied for the the second-worst team of all time, alongside the 1992-93 Dallas Mavericks and ahead of only the famously abominable Charlotte Bobcats squad that went 7-59 during the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season. If they don’t manage that 11th win by the end of the year, we can call them the worst full-season team in the history of the NBA.
Update: I somehow forgot that 10-72 Sixers team, and the 9-73 Sixers from the pre-merger days was left out of my searches because ORtg+ and DRtg+ only cover the post-merger era. So this year’s Wiz wouldn’t be THE worst unless they only win three more games, as opposed to four.
The NBA trade deadline is next week, so I’m offering a 25% discount on paid subscriptions.
A paid subscription gets you access to weekly deep dives, Three Things I Noticed on League Pass, subscriber mailbags and chats, and daily-updating leaderboards for Adjusted Efficiency, Aggression+, and Variance+. For a full breakdown of what’s on offer, click right here.
But let’s go deeper.
The Wiz are losing by an average of 14.7 points per game. That's more than 6 points per game worse than the second-worst team in the league (the Pelicans), and a mere 0.5 points better than the team with the worst point differential of all time, the aforementioned 92-93 Mavs. It’s almost a full point worse than the 11-12 Bobcats!
Adjusted for pace and opponent strength1, the gap between the Wiz and the second-worst team this year gets a little bit closer, but it's still huge: Washington's SRS is -12.92 and New Orleans' is -8.08. That -12.92 SRS, by the way, is third-worst in the history of American professional basketball. Only the 92-93 Mavs (-14.68), and 11-12 Bobcats (-13.96), have been worse.
Head over to the Adjusted Efficiency tab on the front page and you’ll see that we’ve got these Wiz similarly situated as the third-worst team since the ABA-NBA merger all the way back in 1976, again behind only the 11-12 Cats and the 92-93 Mavs.
They are also right on the verge of being the only team besides those 92-93 Mavs in the bottom 20 all time in both ORtg+ (T-13th) and DRtg+ (T-24th). The 92-93 Mavs were 11th and 12th, respectively, in those metrics; and 11-12 Bobcats were 8th and 23rd. They’re all right in the same area. That’s bottom 20 out of 1,350 team-seasons, by the way.
It should be unsurprising, then, to hear that the Wizards are 30th (aka dead last) in both offensive rating and defensive rating this year. The last team to do that was the 2018 Phoenix Suns. But even they had only a -9.4 point differential and -8.80 SRS. So they weren’t nearly as bad as this year’s Wiz. Before them, it was those 11-12 Bobcats. And those are the only three times a team has been ranked 30-302 this century. (The 92-93 Mavs were 27th out of 27 in both offense and defense.)
And it’s not like there’s just one root cause of this two-way terribleness. They don’t do anything well, on either side of the ball.
They don't make their threes (29th). They don't make their twos (27th). They don't even make their free throws (22nd). They don't generate the best shots (20th in the share of attempts from 0-3 feet; 30th in the share of threes that come from the corners). They get demolished in the nightly possession battle. They play the blandest, least-aggressive defense in the league, opponents are even more bland and less aggressive against them, and opponents hardly ever even stray outside the bounds of their own scheme — because the Wizards have nobody worth doing so for.
Are they actually, legitimately, the single-worst team of all time? Right now, I think I would say no. The 92-93 Mavs and the 11-12 Bobcats seem like they were ever-so-slightly worse.
But if they’re not quite there just yet, they are pretty goddamn close, and enough can happen over the second half of the season to make me change my mind. And given the way things have been going of late, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if it did.
Adjusted for garbage time, they’re even worse, according to Cleaning the Glass.
Or 29-29 before the Bobcats/Hornets franchise re-entered the league.
Least aggressive defense is the thing. They dont get into their man at all. The NBA is a game that values strength, but nearly every guy on the wiz is built like a toothpick, so on defense they stand a safe distance away from their man.
Their fast pace let’s opposing players put up huge numbers against them. In Vegas take the over on the opposing player prop. In Fantasy If you have to choose a guy to stream pick the one that’s playing the wizards.