NBA Season Preview 2019-20: The 5 biggest questions for the Washington Wizards

What happens with John Wall? Is Bradley Beal cursed? Whither Isaiah Thomas? Here are some of the biggest questions facing the 2019-20 Washington Wizards.

With all that’s happened in the past two seasons, it seems crazy to remember that the 2016-17 Washington Wizards were just one game from the Eastern Conference Finals. The Wizards may have lost their tightly contested second-round series to the Boston Celtics, but they played exceptionally hard. Behind their talented trio of John Wall, Bradley Beal and Otto Porter Jr., they seemed poised to make an impact in the Eastern Conference for years to come.

Well, fast forward two years, and the outlook has changed dramatically. The Wizards followed up their exciting run with a first-round exit at the hands of the Toronto Raptors in 2018, before the wheels fell off entirely en route to just 32 wins last year. Only three players now remain from the team that impressed in those 2017 playoffs: Wall, Beal and expensive reserve center Ian Mahinmi, and Wall has no timetable to return from a ruptured Achilles he suffered at the end of January.

The prognosis for the upcoming season looks rather bleak. The Eastern Conference may be diminished, but the Wizards still stack up poorly on paper compared to most of the would-be playoff teams. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most pressing questions the Wizards will look to answer during their transient campaign.

1. What are the chances John Wall is still on the Wizards roster at the end of the season?

Around 80-90 percent, just based on the sheer difficulty of actually trading John Wall in 2019. Wall is a great player when healthy, a dynamic athlete and one of the NBA’s best puppet-masters at the point guard position.

Unfortunately, that “when healthy” does a significant amount of heavy lifting: Wall will likely miss most or all of the 2019-20 season as he rehabs a ruptured Achilles tendon. He hasn’t played organized basketball since last December, and he’s only just beginning the four-year, $171 million contract extension he signed in 2017. It might be the single most undesirable contract in the league at this point in time.

2. Why does the universe keep turning Bradley Beal’s lemonade back into lemons?

Is it possible that Beal made a wish on a Monkey’s Paw for one of the greatest statistical seasons in Wizards history? We have to at least consider it, right?

In all seriousness, though, it’s unfortunate that Beal’s ascension has been mirrored by the utter decay of the Wizards’ roster. Wall’s injuries, the unfortunate Mahinmi contract, the decline of important role players like Marcin Gortat and Markieff Morris — it seems like the better Beal gets, the more things go wrong.

Last season’s Wizards were ultimately throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and to the general surprise of nobody, cast-offs like Dwight Howard, Jabari Parker, Bobby Portis, Jeff Green and Sam Dekker proved not to be the answer. That’s how an All-NBA caliber player ends up with the Sisyphean task of leading the league in minutes on a 32-win team.

3. At the end of this season, it will be clear that Rui Hachimura is                   .

A middling prospect. I’m just not sold on Rui Hachimura yet. He’s had an encouraging enough offseason, making the NBA Summer League Second Team and looking generally productive in the preseason, but there are still real concerns about how his game will fit at the NBA level.

Almost everything about him just feels a little bit off. He was a prolific scorer at Gonzaga, but largely prioritized an archaic mid-range approach and took only 76 3-pointers in his three college seasons. He has a shoot-first mentality, which becomes an issue when the shots he takes aren’t terribly efficient, and his passing was virtually nonexistent. Can he fit into a modern NBA offense? It’s not like he’ll be making an impact on the other end of the floor; his defense has traditionally ranged from mediocre to terrible.

The Wizards are deploying all the typical, optimistic sound bites about their new forward — coach Scott Brooks said he played like a “wise veteran” in the preseason — but that’s more expected than surprising for a newly drafted top-10 pick. Hachimura is certainly a buzz-worthy player — he’s the first Japanese-born player to be picked in the first round of the NBA Draft — but he still has a ways to go to justify his lofty draft slot this season.

4. Isaiah Thomas? Maybe? Something?

At this point, Isaiah Thomas is the basketball equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat. Does he have anything left, or is there really no way back for the guy who finished fifth in 2016-17 MVP voting? The Wizards are about to open the box and find out.

At the very least, Washington does seem like an ideal spot for Thomas to begin his comeback attempt in earnest. The Wizards will likely be dwelling near the cellar of the East for much of the season, which brings much lower expectations than some of his previous destinations. With little to play for in the short-term and few other compelling options on the depth chart at point guard, the Wizards will have the luxury of letting Thomas work himself back into form.

5. At what point does this Wizards season become entirely about next year’s draft?

To be frank, it already should be. Even in a diminished Eastern Conference, it’s difficult to chart a course for this team to make the playoffs this season. Beyond Beal, Thomas Bryant, Davis Bertans and Ish Smith, there just aren’t any players that appear likely to be a net positive on the court right now. It would take revelatory seasons from young players like Hachimura, Troy Brown Jr. and Moritz Wagner to even consider it, and that still likely wouldn’t be enough.

However, the real-life answer to that question lies in how the franchise handles Bradley Beal. He’s one of the hottest trade commodities in the league right now, and while the Wizards have thus far resisted the temptation to deal him, the second they do so will launch this franchise into a substantial rebuild.

The Wizards would undoubtedly love to keep him in town for the foreseeable future, but free agency looms in the summer of 2021. Can they afford to risk letting him walk for nothing?