Wizards and Magic rebuild seasons started in drastically different ways
ORLANDO, Fla. — The difference between how the Orlando Magic started their most recent rebuild and how the Washington Wizards opened theirs could not be starker.
One franchise jump-started its rebuild by making a difficult, but proactive, decision.
The other team kneecapped itself when it failed to do the same.
Orlando traded Nikola Vučević at exactly the right time, and it is now reaping the rewards . Washington waited too long to trade Bradley Beal , and it almost certainly will take at least several years to recover from that misstep.
The contrast came into sharp relief Wednesday night as the Magic throttled the Wizards 139-120 at Amway Center. Orlando has emerged from its rebuild, thanks in large part to third-year forward Franz Wagner , who scored a game-high 31 points and played tough defense.
The Vučević trade made it possible for Orlando to select point guard Jalen Suggs and Wagner in the top eight of the same draft — a starting point of epic proportions.
For context, let’s flash back to the 2020-21 season, when the Magic were fresh off making two consecutive playoff appearances, both first-round exits. The team had high hopes until young point guard Markelle Fultz tore a knee ligament early in the season. With Fultz sidelined and the Magic’s other top young player, forward Jonathan Isaac , dealing with a more serious knee injury, the team opened with a 15-29 record even though Vučević was having a superb season, earning his second All-Star nod and averaging a career-high 24.5 points per game.
Magic president of basketball operations Jeff Weltman had concluded what many rival talent evaluators also had come to believe: The Magic’s veteran nucleus of Vučević, Aaron Gordon and Evan Fournier could never advance past the first round of the playoffs.
So, rather than allowing his team to remain no better than mediocre, Weltman traded Vučević, Gordon and Fournier in separate deals in the hours just before the season’s trade deadline. The Vučević deal was the most significant of the three trades. The Magic sent Vučević and Al-Farouq Aminu to the Chicago Bulls for Wendell Carter Jr. , Otto Porter Jr. and, most important of all, a protected first-round pick in 2021 and a protected first-round pick in 2023.
The trades brought harsh short-term consequences, but none of the trades was more painful than the Vučević deal. Vučević was popular among Magic fans, and trading him and starting a fresh rebuild upset coach Steve Clifford, prompting Clifford and the Magic to part ways after the season ended.
Trading Vučević, Gordon and Fournier brought enormous risk. Would the fan base tolerate another race to the bottom of the league standings? For further context, the Magic franchise had never fully recovered from trading Dwight Howard after the 2011-12 season following his trade demand. That rebuild, started under Weltman’s predecessor, Rob Hennigan, never succeeded because of bad lottery luck, some drafting mistakes, poor coaching hires (in which Hennigan was overruled twice, with the hires of Scott Skiles and Frank Vogel) and a disastrous trade for Serge Ibaka. As a result, the Magic went six consecutive years out of the playoffs before they finally returned in 2018-19 with Vučević leading the way.
Trading Vučević, Gordon and Fournier guaranteed a rotten end to the 2020-21 season and, if the team did not draft well and did not receive lottery luck, perhaps many more years of struggle.
But it is difficult to overstate the importance of the two incoming protected first-round picks from the Bulls in the Vučević deal. The Bulls stumbled for the remainder of the 2020-21 season and conveyed their pick, eighth overall, to the Magic. The Magic wound up picking Suggs at No. 5 and Wagner at No. 8.
What a jump start that turned out to be.
Wagner, now only 22 years old, already is a two-way player, adept on offense and defense, and there’s little doubt he and the Magic will reach a maximum-salary contract extension before next season. Suggs, also just 22, has emerged as a defensive standout whose long-range shooting has improved.
During Suggs’ and Wagner’s rookie seasons, Orlando bottomed out ruthlessly, finishing with the league’s second-worst record, 22-60. The fans endured a year of utter misery, but that misery also yielded an unexpected but massive reward. The Magic won the lottery and used the top overall pick to draft power forward Paolo Banchero .
In the span of two drafts, the Magic had selected three top-eight talents: Suggs, Wagner and Banchero.
And now, after hiring the right coach, Jamahl Mosley, and ramping up their player-development system, the Magic have emerged as one of the NBA ’s most surprising teams. At 13-5, they own the league’s third-best record. Orlando likely will regress at least a bit because of tough mid-December games and a brutal January schedule, but the franchise is on the right track.
The Wizards, on the other hand, missed their chance at a Vučević-level haul even though Beal was considered a far better player at his zenith than Vučević was in early 2021.
The best time to trade Beal would have been in 2019, 2020 or early 2021. By that time, John Wall had suffered a career-altering injury that upended the Wizards’ otherwise sound plans to build their team around a Wall-Beal backcourt.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight after the Wizards’ disappointing 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons, it is easy to say the Wizards should have traded Beal in those years in which Beal was plagued by injuries and underperformed. At the time when Beal’s trade value would have been its highest, team owner Ted Leonsis was reluctant to rebuild. The key decision-makers knew — correctly — that if they traded Beal, they could go years without drafting another player of Beal’s caliber.
But it is also fair to say Wizards officials overvalued Beal and attempted to shoehorn him into a franchise cornerstone role for which he was not suited, either defensively or as the team leader.
Then, after the 2021-22 season, the Wizards compounded their mistake by agreeing to include a no-trade clause in a maximum-salary contract for Beal. That no-trade clause would allow Beal to veto any trade and, if the Wizards were determined to trade him, allow Beal to steer his way to the team of his choice even if the Wizards had better offers from elsewhere.
So, when Leonsis fired president and general manager Tommy Sheppard after the 2022-23 season and hired Michael Winger in the new role of president of Monumental Basketball, Winger and Winger’s general manager hire, Will Dawkins, were hamstrung when they chose to trade Beal.
Winger and Dawkins wound up trading Beal, Jordan Goodwin and Isaiah Todd to the Phoenix Suns for six second-round picks, first-round pick swaps in 2024, 2026, 2028 and 2030, Chris Paul and Landry Shamet . Paul later was routed to the Golden State Warriors for Jordan Poole , Patrick Baldwin Jr. , Ryan Rollins , a 2027 second-round pick and a top-20 protected first-round pick in 2030.
Winger and Dawkins, through no fault of their own because they arrived after Beal had been given his no-trade clause, could not give Washington a jump start comparable to the one Orlando generated in its Vučević deal.
That’s not to say that the Wizards’ rebuild — and it will be a rebuild, not a “reshaping,” as team officials prefer to say — cannot succeed. It still can succeed. But as things stand now, Washington holds a total of only three first-round picks in the next three drafts. (Although the Wizards owe the New York Knicks a protected first-round pick that could be conveyed in 2024 or 2025 or 2026, it’s highly unlikely a first-round pick ever will convey to the Knicks because the Wizards almost certainly will remain near the bottom of the league standings the rest of this season, the 2024-25 season and the 2025-26 season.)
With relatively few bites at the apple (at least for now), the Wizards will face greater pressure to make the best possible selections with their upcoming first-round picks. Lottery luck would be great for them, but no matter where they pick, they have to hit on their draft choices for the rebuild to gain traction.
In the meantime, the team’s fans and Leonsis will have to remain patient. The 2024 draft class is considered to be relatively weak , and the percentages say the Wizards will not be as lucky in the lottery as the Magic were when the Magic were able to draft Banchero.
A large number of Washington’s fans asked to have the roster torn down and start fresh, and they were correct to do so. But because the team did not reach the same conclusion as early as those fans did and held onto Beal for too long, the wait for the franchise to return to relevance again likely will take longer.
(Top photo of Jordan Poole and Franz Wagner: Kim Klement Neitzel / USA Today)
