The Washington Wizards bear a unique debt to their fan base.
Among NBA franchises founded before 2000, Washington is the only team that hasn’t recorded a single 50-win regular season in the last four-plus decades.
Washington hasn’t won 50 games in a season since 1978-79, the year after the then-Bullets won their only NBA championship. Since then, 14 different franchises, slightly less than half of the league, have won at least one title, and every other team (except the current Charlotte Hornets, who started play in 2004-05 as the Charlotte Bobcats) has reached at least one conference final. In fact, more than half of the NBA’s teams — 17 — have made five or more conference finals during that stretch.
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Fans in D.C. have waited longer than any other fan base in the league for a team that both wins at a consistently high level and has a real chance to contend. Many franchises have built, rebuilt and re-rebuilt contenders during that stretch, while Washington has meandered from decade to decade, never achieving anything approaching league wide relevance.
Occasionally, a superstar has come through the District — Chris Webber, Gilbert Arenas, John Wall — and, briefly, raised expectations. But it’s never been sustainable.
The Wizards’ new brain trust has been empowered by team governor Ted Leonsis to do whatever it takes to, finally, put the franchise on a true contender footing. The new front office is attempting to do just that, with a comprehensive rebuild of the franchise from the bottom up. The Athletic is examining the myriad changes in philosophy, personnel and infrastructure that the Wizards are making as they try, at long last, to remake the NBA’s most forlorn franchise.
Part I: How the Wizards are emphasizing “small wins.”
PHILADELPHIA — As Washington Wizards players walked into the visitors’ locker room inside the Wells Fargo Center on Monday night, they found plenty of healthy options to refuel, either to eat on-site or to take with them for their short plane trip home to Greater Washington.
Chicken cacciatore, steak, shrimp, yellow rice with chickpeas and steamed carrots and broccoli awaited buffet-style in chafing dishes in two separate stations — one for players, another for staff members. Individual Greek salads in containers and a chocolate desert were available too.
Every NBA team provides food for their players at home and on the road, but the Wizards organization has taken it a step further this season.
For the first time in team history, the Wizards are bringing their own chef and sous-chef on road trips. The chef, Rudy Moures, and sous-chef, Juan Jimenez, cook healthy, customized meals for the Wizards’ traveling party — a stark, and welcome, change from relying on chefs at the team hotels and caterers and/or away-city restaurants on game nights.
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The team is renting out cooking time and space in the kitchens of all the hotels where it will stay this season and transporting the meals the chefs create to the road arenas — or, when needed, directly to the team plane — before the team flies out of a city.
Forward Deni Avdija said, “I think nutrition is one of the most important things for an athlete, and having a chef out on the road solves a lot of things: better food, better recovery and getting ready for an 82-game season.”
Bringing a chef and a sous-chef on team road trips may seem like a relatively inconsequential step, but for the Wizards, it’s one piece in a broader — and long overdue — effort to improve the franchise’s infrastructure and give players, coaches and staff members more resources to do their jobs.
When team governor Ted Leonsis hired Michael Winger in late May to become the new president of Monumental Basketball, and Winger then tapped Will Dawkins as the Wizards’ new general manager, Winger and Dawkins started work to bring the Wizards organization more in line with NBA rivals’ best practices. Dawkins referred to the process as “leveling up.”
“Michael will get tired of me coming back to him asking for more resources to pour into the staff as well as the players,” Dawkins said before training camp. “But we know what it looks like, and we want to get it to there, and we want this to be a place where people want to come, players want to come, staff want to come work, because they know that they’re going to get better and they’re going to be supported while they’re here.”
The Wizards’ attempts at “leveling up” to compete with best-in-class NBA teams involve significant outlays of both people and material throughout the organization. The NBA is no different from other North American professional sports leagues: As franchises battle against one another on the court, those same franchises compete off the court in a continuous arms race of sorts to provide bigger and better facilities and optimized player services. To be sure, a goal is to give players and team employees everything they need to be at their best.
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But at the same time, franchises vie against one another for bragging rights as they attempt to retain players and attract new players in free agency. Even in a world where the sizes of player contracts, the chances to contend for a title and the quality of players’ individual roles are critical when players make life decisions, teams’ reputations for going above and beyond for their players — or, in some cases, not going above and beyond — matter.
“Infrastructural enhancements are not intended to directly translate to high performance, though some might, but instead aim to reduce the friction for our players and staff en route to high performance,” Winger told The Athletic. “Giving our players and staff a workplace devoted to their care, comfort, inspiration and safety is in essence just clearing and illuminating the runway for them to take flight.
“Talent craves these types of environments, and if we can create that for them, they’re free to be curious, exploratory, innovative, vulnerable and not spend valuable time or brainpower on the things we can provide or accomplish for them. And secondly, infrastructural enrichment and integrity are tone-setting. Whether environmentally or an unwavering commitment to excellence, these enhancements create a visible and behavioral representation of who we are becoming, and the types of contributions and commitments we expect from everyone invited into our organization.”
So, chefs and sous-chefs, on the road.
After that game in Philadelphia, Moures, wearing a white short-sleeve chef’s uniform with a Wizards logo emblazoned across the left part of his upper chest, stood adjacent to the players’ buffet area. (The Wizards have had chefs available at the team’s practice facility in Southeast D.C. for years to make meals for players after practices.)
“There are times … in certain cities that we play, there’s not necessarily too many places that stay open after our game,” said center Daniel Gafford, who added it’s difficult after home games as well to find fulfilling meals away from Capital One Arena.
“So having somebody that is amazing at what he does when it comes to food is perfect for us because now we always have at least some type of option for food,” Gafford said.
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Another example of how the team is enhancing its services: Like all other NBA teams, the Wizards have mental health professionals available for the needs of players. In past seasons, for instance, Jeremy Rahn, the team’s mental health consultant, already traveled on the road with the team prior to this season (and even helped collect rebounds during team practices and player warm-ups).
But this year, team sources said, the team is also in the midst of hiring mental health staff solely for players’ families, to help the spouses, partners and other relatives who also have real issues with wellness, finances and dealing with being in the public eye. (And, of course, on occasion, dealing with the players themselves too.)
Over the summer, the Wizards laid off several members of their basketball operations department. In the months since, Winger has made new hires who brought the department’s number of full-time employees close to its number before the layoffs. One of those new hires includes the department’s first in-house legal counsel.
Details also matter in the physical workplace for Monumental Basketball personnel.
Before Leonsis hired Winger, and Winger hired Dawkins and new senior vice president of player personnel Travis Schlenk last spring, officials from other teams indicated that the Wizards’ practice facility — the Entertainment and Sports Arena, opened in 2018, and also the home arena and practice facility for the WNBA’s Mystics and the G League’s Capital City Go-Go — lacked some of the amenities of other teams’ practice facilities, and also lacked adequate working space for staff.
The building, charitably, could have used another floor to house all of the constituents who use it daily. But you work with the facility you have, not the one you want. And what was good in 2018 is not suitable enough now in 2023, after the sizes of the Wizards’, Go-Go’s and Mystics’ staffs increased over the last five years. Meanwhile, rival teams — including the Atlanta Hawks and Orlando Magic, who compete in the NBA’s Southeast Division against the Wizards — have built state-of-the-art practice facilities in recent years.
After consulting with the new front office, Leonsis has green-lit more than $1 million in initial improvements to the building. In the first phase, the conference space at the facility is being enlarged, with existing offices being reduced from eight to three, to create more open spaces, both for existing staff and for an enhanced analytics department, and to allow more natural light to enter the building.
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A second phase will redo the coaches’ offices and the public-relations wing of the building. Because the Wizards, Go-Go and Mystics have overlapping seasons, enhancing and improving the players’ spaces and locker rooms will have to be done in stages to minimize disruptions in-season. Long-range plans include installing massive LED boards on the practice floor that will allow coaches to air video from practice in real time and immediately correct mistakes, rather than having to go into the existing theater space adjacent to the practice court after practices to emphasize teaching points.
The total outlay over the next two to three years is expected to cost between $6 million and $8 million. And, this is for a building that is owned by the city, not by Leonsis.
Leonsis, though, is now planning to leave the city, announcing Wednesday that he will move forward with a proposed plan that will be voted on by the Virginia state legislature that would build a new arena for the Wizards and Capitals in the Potomac Yard neighborhood in Alexandria, Va. That massive, $2 billion project also would include the construction of a brand-new practice facility for the Wizards, a necessity going forward if Washington wants to truly compete for high-level free agents.
The Wizards also have significantly increased the size of their traveling party for road games. They’ve added two full-time physical performance staffers and an additional athletic trainer, to go along with the team’s director of player health, Michael Ashton, and other specialists.
Equally important to the players and coaches: For years, Washington had one full-time head of security, along with an assistant, traveling with the team. Now, the Wizards have three security officers who travel for every road game. (They originally had four, but one member of the security team left the Wizards at the beginning of the season for another job.)
“It always gives us that feeling of safety,” Gafford said of the additional security staff.
“There’s a lot of people in this world that kind of get a little bit too comfortable when it comes to talking to us,” he said. “Having somebody to be able to kind of be that ‘no’ guy or that ‘no’ woman is something that we really can utilize because we don’t want to be the bad guys, but we’ve got people that can be the bad guys, if that makes sense.”
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Security also has been enhanced at home.
For years, the Wizards exited a hallway outside their locker room at Capital One Arena and walked or jogged to the playing court through a narrow corridor — a “vomitory,” in arena parlance. The corridor also is accessible to the public, primarily high-rollers whose seats are just off the floor and who use the corridor to walk to the arena’s amenities for season-ticket holders, as well as Capital One Arena’s underground parking garage.
The vomitory also abuts a common area where the team’s radio and television crews conduct in-game interviews and postgame shows and where players’ friends, families and agents gather.
Often, all of these groups would intersect in the open space at the same time, seeking the players’ attention. There were arena ushers and guards in front of the hallway leading to the locker room entrance, and credentials were required to get past them, but the hallway outside the locker room was, basically, open and visible for anyone to see.
This season, though, a huge opaque floor-to-ceiling glass door has been installed in front the hallway leading to the locker room, blocking visibility and, with help from a security guard, access. The Wizards now enter and exit the playing floor near midcourt — through the same entrance Capitals players use to step onto the ice for hockey games — and that entrance allows them to access the locker room area.
Ticket-holders can still access the vomitory, but the players are no longer visible there to those passers-by.
“When we’re doing our job, and we’re on the clock, we want to be 100 percent focused on what we’re doing,” forward Corey Kispert said. It was a distraction, he said, “when we had to leave the locker room and weave in and out of people who were grabbing their beers and their popcorn.”
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The new entrance to the court “gives us a chance to stay locked in 100 percent of the time and not have to worry about ruining someone’s fan experience, or them ruining our playing experience,” Kispert said.
“We definitely mentioned that (to management). The guys in the front office were really open with us about, ‘If there’s anything that we’re missing, or you guys know from playing here that we can’t see,’ (tell them). That (vomitory intersection) was one of the things that I had a pet peeve with and was bothered by.”
For fans shelling out top dollar to watch a terrible on-court product this season, all of this may seem crazy. And, on some level, it may be. But this is part of how NBA players keep score on a much different, and much more important, playing field. That’s the constituency the Wizards’ new brain trust has to reach, and impress.
They’re aware of how far behind they are, and now they are accelerating their efforts to catch up to the pack.
As one member of the front office said recently, “We have to work on who we want to be before we ever get to what we want to look like on the basketball court.”
In Part III of the series, The Athletic will examine how the Wizards new front office is planning to construct a roster in the next few years that can, finally, compete at the top of the NBA and contend for championships.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Craig Hudson / The Washington Post via Getty Images)