
This is what happens when hostage negotiations go bad.
Let’s not sugarcoat this: That’s a horrible return for Bradley Beal. Horrible.
But, the next sentence is equally accurate: Washington’s new front office had no choice, with Beal’s no-trade clause the ultimate trump card.
I thought giving Beal the no-trade, on top of the $251 million max contract last year, was, if unpleasant, a not-awful intangible to include to make sure you kept your star player happy. I wrote it. I said it. And I was wrong. Way wrong. Stupid wrong. Dewey Defeats Truman wrong. It was a cataclysmically bad decision, one that Ted Leonsis has to own — given that he fired the general manager of record when the deal was agreed upon last summer. At any rate, it doesn’t matter if it was Tommy Sheppard’s idea, or Mark Bartelstein’s, or if the folks down in AI cooked it up: Leonsis is the Wizards’ governor. He OK’d it. He has to wear it. Forever.
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And that’s why the Wizards had to take pennies on the dollar for their three-time All-Star, now happily on his way to Phoenix to play out his days alongside Kevin Durant and Devin Booker, while Washington gets a bunch of second-round picks and Landry Shamet, not that there’s anything wrong with Landry Shamet. (The pick swaps between Washington and Phoenix that will, eventually, be part of this deal are so far down the road that the road they’re on hasn’t been built yet. Think about it: The Wizards aren’t going to do pick swaps with a team that’s going to be better than them for the next half-dozen seasons. Think 2029, 2030 at the earliest.)
Chris Paul is in the deal too, and this is where Michael Winger, Will Dawkins and Travis Schlenk could at least salvage something useful out of this fiasco.
BREAKING: The Washington Wizards are trading three-time All-Star Bradley Beal to the Phoenix Suns for Chris Paul, Landry Shamet, a handful of second-round picks, and multiple pick swaps, league sources tell @TheAthletic @Stadium.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) June 18, 2023
Paul will, almost certainly, never play a second in D.C. At 38, he clearly wants to expend whatever hoop energy he has left playing on a contending team. There was reporting Sunday that the Clippers will want to reacquire Paul, the Mayor of Lob City from 2011-17. And, look, Winger certainly knows that roster better than anyone; if there’s someone he truly covets, that could happen. (Do I like Terance Mann? No. I love Terance Mann!)
But I can’t imagine the Lakers are going to sit idly by and allow CP3 back into whatever they’re calling Staples Center now to play for Steve Ballmer’s team — and leave in a year to play in Ballmer’s new palace in Inglewood. CP3 and LeBron are charter members of the Banana Boat Crew. They’ve wanted to play 2gether4ever. The Lakers just happen to desperately need a point guard — and, while Paul isn’t what he once was, he’s still pretty damn good in shorter, managed bursts. And, the Wizards don’t have to waive Paul; they can keep him on their roster all year, whether he actually plays — or even shows up. If he doesn’t play … so what? No skin off Washington’s nose. So there’s no reason for the Wizards not to hold out for a trade.
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The Lakers don’t have a lot of assets, but they could package Malik Beasley and Mo Bamba, each on expiring contracts after next season, in a package that would match the $28.4 million guaranteed portion of Paul’s 2023-24 salary in a potential trade. (Bamba’s deal is non-guaranteed for next season if he is waived before June 29.) The Wizards could also hold out for more and ask that Jarred Vanderbilt or L.A.’s first-round pick in Thursday’s draft — or both — be included in a deal too, which might result in the Lakers expanding the trade to ask for Delon Wright. Washington could also try to add a third team into the mix who could help facilitate the deal with additional draft picks and/or players going to both the Wizards and Lakers.
Bottom line, though, is that there’s a relatively clean deal that the Lakers can make for Paul that could bring additional assets to D.C. Stay tuned.
Nonetheless, the Wizards close the Beal Era jaggedly, horribly. Miami has clearly prioritized getting Damian Lillard from Portland, with Jimmy Butler a central part of the Heat’s recruiting pitch. While Washington wanted the multiple first-rounders the Heat were offering, it didn’t matter; Beal wanted to play in Phoenix. His wife and her family are from California, and KD and Booker are a smidge more potent offensively than Jimmy Buckets and Bam Adebayo. The Wizards couldn’t stay in a holding pattern; unwilling to wait on the Heat, they turned to Phoenix, which our Shams Charania first reported had gotten into the sweepstakes seriously on Saturday.
Other teams made their pitches. The Knicks were in heavy for a while. Boston kicked the tires. The Bucks made a move late. The Kings made inquiries, but were unwilling to include Keegan Murray, their first-round pick from last year, whom the Wizards had tried to move up to select in the ’22 draft, in a potential trade. But all of those teams wanted to attach bad contracts to their offers. The Wizards wanted to have all Beal Business off of their books in 12 months. Mission accomplished.
It’s been clear since Leonsis hired the new brain trust that they didn’t come here for a soft tweaking. They wanted to rip this roster apart and finally start the painful process of a full rebuild, the same thing every team in NBA history has, at one point or another, had to do. The Wizards did it just a few years ago, too, and it led to a backcourt of John Wall and Beal, which led Washington deeper into the postseason than it had been in decades. So, the idea that tanking (sorry, Ted) was something beneath this franchise was farcical. The last three years, as some of us may have mentioned a few dozen thousand times or so, wasted everyone’s time — starting with Beal’s.
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But, that shouldn’t obscure what a good citizen Beal was here, from the second he arrived in 2012.
He worked his butt off to become one of the better players in the league, and a three-time All-Star. In the fog of decrying his contract, a lot of people in town have acted like he was some kind of stumblebum. He was not. He led the league in scoring in 2020, and if he wasn’t one of the 10 best players in the league, well, OK. He was still pretty damn good, a three-level scorer. He was a leader, sponsoring classes at Ron Brown College Prep for years, and won the NBA’s Community Cares Assist Award in 2019. He lent his voice and presence to co-leading, along with Natasha Cloud, the march of Wizards and Mystics players protesting police brutality and institutional racism after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020. Beal never brought a moment’s embarrassment to the city.
He was, and is, a good dude, and he’ll be terrific as a secondary or third option, depending on who’s on the floor, in Phoenix.
He wanted to stay here, break the franchise’s scoring record and play his whole career for the team that drafted him, because he believed, strongly, in loyalty. But, at some point, we find out that Santa Claus isn’t real, that our parents aren’t perfect, and that “Succession” won’t be on forever. You move on.
The Wizards are going to lose a lot of games the next couple of years, as the current roster is deconstructed for whatever the Wizards can get. Sunday, it cannot be stated enough, was not a good day for the franchise. But it was a castor-oil sandwich the team had to eat, having made such poor choices the last couple of years. Digesting this bad deal will provide, at long last, a path to relevance, with clean books in the near future, and new draft picks in the offing, with a clear-eyed, unsentimental group now in charge — seeking to right a ship that has, for so, so long, listed to port.
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(Photo of Bradley Beal: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
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