The Washington Wizards end their season Sunday in Miami, and come Monday, the team will conduct their end-of-year exit interviews and get into the process of the offseason program as they look ahead to the 2025-26 campaign.
They’re guaranteed to finish with a bottom three record, meaning they have the best odds (14 percent) of winning the Draft Lottery and can pick no worse than seventh (which could go as high as fifth pending the final days of the season) – and for GM Will Dawkins, hopefully, they can find another player who will be as impact of a pick right away as Alex Sarr was this season.
Several others have also shown great strides, and with two games left, even if Miami and Chicago are pretty much locked into playing each other in the play-in tournament, they still have 96 minutes of final evaluation to go.
“It can be tough at moments to kind of prepare yourself for who you're playing with because teams are experimenting and doing different things, but for us, they’re all data points,” Dawkins said. “Every time you get an opportunity to go on an NBA floor, you know that they're NBA caliber players, and we focus mostly on us at this point - what are we trying to do, how are we trying to do it, what can we learn, and how do we grow from there? Every game is a data point, and we have two more left before we kind of transition into the offseason.”
Listen to Dawkins’ entire visit with The Junkies, which includes a few thoughts about other specific young players, above!