SBN Reacts: Wizards fans give team a median grade of D this season

Orlando Magic v Washington Wizards — Fans aren’t pleased with the Wizards and would like to ask the players, “Why?” | Photo by Stephen Gosling/NBAE via Getty Images

That and fan confidence are in the books!

Thank you for your responses to this week’s SB Nation NBA Reacts survey. To sign up for our weekly national survey, click on the link below.

Only 1 in 3 Wizards fans are confident in the team’s direction

The numbers speak for themselves. Here’s why the 70 or so out of 210+ respondents feel confident:

“I really like the combination of Kristaps Porziņģis, Deni Avdija and Corey Kispert in the frontcourt, with Daniel Gafford, Rui Hachimura and Anthony Gill as backups.”
“Since whiffing on Troy Brown Jr, they’ve generally drafted pretty well for their position. Hope they lose enough games the rest of the way to maybe snag a higher lottery pick.”
“Since whiffing on Troy Brown Jr, they’ve generally drafted pretty well for their position. Hope they lose enough games the rest of the way to maybe snag a higher lottery pick.”
“You can see improvement, both on defense and offense. Are they there yet? No. But moving in the right direction.”

And here’s why 140 or so fans are not:

“Until the Wizards move on from Beal this team is not going in the right direction. As far as not making play-in tournament, the Wizards traded a lot of talent away that was good enough to beat 76ers twice without significant contributions from Beal.”
“We still have a logjam at C, no point guard, Beal is NOT an all-NBA talent, and we don’t develop our young talent in a manner where they have any confidence in themselves.”
“The Wizards have to solve the guard problem and the org has not shown any ability to draft well outside of the first and second picks in the draft.”
“They need to trade Beal, his value will never be higher and they aren’t winning a title with him. They need to do a real rebuild. Trade Beal and Kuzma, rebuild and work from the ground up.”
“The Wizards will make the mistake of super maxing Beal when he does not deserve it. They should use the argument they made with Gilbert Arenas back in 2009. By accepting less money, they can sign more good players to build a winning team.”

Fans give the Wizards a “D” for this season, given that the play-in is effectively out of reach

The Wizards are one loss or one Atlanta Hawks win away from missing the play-in tournament of the NBA Playoffs. Given the near-certainty of missing the postseason in some form for the first time since the 2018-19 season*, we asked what you would grade the team.

While the plurality of respondents, or the most-selected choice was a “C” (or 39 percent), the results were heavily skewed toward the D (38 percent) and F (17 percent) range. Since over 50 percent of respondents would give the Wizards a D or F, the median grade is a D.

I would also give the Wizards a D. The 10-3 start at the beginning of the season was nice, but it was fool’s gold. And while the Wizards may end up winning about 35 games this season, they were also expected to be better than 12th place in the East. Granted, the Eastern Conference is a very strong conference top to bottom this season, but Washington lost a good number of “winnable” games and gave up some big 20 or even 30 point leads that turned into losses, like the Jan. 26 game against the Los Angeles Clippers and the Mar. 21 game against the Houston Rockets.

Our national results will be out later this week.

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*I consider the Wizards’ admission into the 2020 Orlando bubble as a postseason appearance though they did not make the Round of 16 in the NBA Playoffs.