When it comes to the Wizards, clear your mind and hope for the best

I go to my quiet space. Descend to the floor and sit cross-legged. I rest my hands in my lap and breathe deeply, slowly, with my eyes closed.

And I visualize Jordan Poole shooting 43 percent from the field and 33 percent from the three-point arc and averaging 20-plus points per game as he did last season, the final of his four in Golden State. This was before the Wizards’ new management moved Bradley Beal and eventually Chris Paul to the Warriors to bring the purported Stephen Curry understudy to Washington. All of this was meant to smooth over what we figured would be a painful overhaul of this team by making it at least entertaining.

But it’s not working. Neither the meditation nor the manufacture.

“You said blow it up!” a Wizards official reminded me last week during a visit to one of their practices (yes, they do practice) in the midst of what is now a nine-game skid .

The Wizards have won only two games against 14 losses. Of the 30 teams in the NBA, only the Detroit Pistons are as woeful. The San Antonio Spurs, with 7-foot-4 wunderkind Victor Wembanyama, have won only one more game. But at least their fans, who had a team that won five titles and perennially contended to win it all for a generation, get to behold the most intriguing talent in just as long.

In Washington, by contrast, we have seen the 6-4 Poole attempt a who-cares three-pointer over onetime Wizards big man Kristaps Porzingis, who blocked the shot. We have seen him try a Curry look-away corner three-pointer that failed. We have seen him misunderstand the rules by letting the ball roll up court untouched and accidentally draining time off the clock when his team needed as much time as possible to mount a comeback bid.

Lampooning isn’t the sort of entertainment I anticipated the Wizards producing. I wasn’t alone. When this season tipped off, Hall of Fame big man Kevin Garnett predicted on his blabber show: “I look for Jordan Poole to be top five in scoring this year. And if he don’t shoot more than 25 balls, I’ll be shocked. And if he don’t have not one but a couple 60 balls this year, I will be shocked.”

But just a few days ago, Garnett profanely spat that Poole’s play is so bad he shouldn’t even be in the league.

Wizards Coach Wes Unseld Jr. hears the criticism.

“That’s unfair,” he told me. “For the first time in his life he’s in a different situation. He’s a 24-year-old who’s been in a backup roll with some of the most elite offensive players in the league on a team that’s been playing a certain way for a decade. Now you’re extracted to a new situation to a new group, new team, new coach. You can’t just plug and play that and assume it’s going to play out the same.

“He’s trying to play right,” Unseld said. “Finds the open man. He’s trying to get off the ball in a timely manner ...”

“But it doesn’t come off that way when we see him,” I interrupted Unseld.

“He knows,” Unseld said. “Teams are eating him up. Something he’s got to figure out. They’re putting size on him. They’re blitzing him at times, getting the ball out of his hands. That’s different for him. Where he could just run easy and run free because he’s got Klay [Thompson] and Steph and Draymond [Green] quarterbacking, we don’t have that.”

In a sense, I feel for Poole and the rest of these guys. It’s difficult to compete when you’re an abnormally, almost haphazardly constructed team. The franchise’s new, Cerberus-configured front office — Monumental Basketball President Michael Winger, General Manager Will Dawkins and senior vice president of player personnel Travis Schlenk — inherited a near-impossible situation. Beal’s no-trade clause meant the Wizards could offload him only to a team he was willing to play for, and that turned out to be the Phoenix Suns. Winger and company got what they could for him and Porzingis.

So for the first time in their careers, Poole and Tyus Jones, acquired in the offseason, are starting regularly, making up a backcourt that is generally smaller than their opponents. Daniel Gafford is on the smaller side for an NBA center, though his competitiveness seems to measure up to anyone’s. Small forward Deni Avdija, whom the franchise’s previous brain trust drafted in 2020 (painfully three spots ahead of 6-5 all-star Tyrese Haliburton), has started every game this season after being a part-time starter last season.

There is 28-year-old power forward Kyle Kuzma, the one player around whom a team absolutely could build, who is scoring and shooting at a clip (22.9 points on 47.4 percent shooting, including 36.8 percent from three) that’s the highest in his seven-year career.

And Winger et al. appear to have proved their talent-scouting acumen by moving up one spot in the last draft to grab Wenbanyama’s teammate in France, 19-year-old wing Bilal Coulibaly , who has the wingspan of a condor. Coulibaly appears more mature than most teenagers and more prepared for the NBA than his slender build suggested. He’s making over half his shots, is shooting a team-best (save little-used Ryan Rollins’s 1 for 2) 44 percent from three and blocked a shot of Luka Doncic that he turned into an alley-oop dunk.

It all adds up to a team on pace to win only a dozen games, two more than the Philadelphia 76ers’ total in the 2015-16 season, the year “The Process” bottomed out. It was the second-worst record ever over a full 82-game season, but two seasons later, the 76ers made the playoffs and haven’t missed a postseason since. They have done so with a couple of good draft picks, a few smart trades and free agent signings, and a couple of championship coaches in Nick Nurse and Doc Rivers.

The 76ers missed the playoffs for three seasons before cratering in their 10-win season. If that’s what this Wizards’ do-over is going to take, that means they could be winning again in a couple of seasons after not being above .500 since 2017-18. That sounds a lot better than what they look like now, and I haven’t even mentioned the blown double-digit, fourth-quarter leads.

Namaste.