The Washington Wizards’ PERFECT Offseason! Realistic Trade & Draft Ideas For The 2025 NBA Offseason

The Washington Wizards’ PERFECT Offseason! Realistic Trade & Draft Ideas For The 2025 NBA Offseason

What’s going on y’all? Welcome back to basketball and more importantly, welcome back to Ideal Off season. This is the series where I put the GM cap on for a little bit and help a team navigate through their off season. Now, we try to keep this series as realistic as possible, meaning we take a look at each team’s individual needs and try to help guide them through the offseason that better positions them after the off season’s over. uh whether it’s the Washington Wizards in this case, you weren’t a very good team these last couple seasons, but you got a couple young guys you’re trying to build upon, we’re going to help you do that. If you’re the Los Angeles Lakers, you got Luca and LeBron, you’re obviously trying to win a championship, so we’re going to try to help you do that. And as mentioned today, the Washington Wizards, a team that has been pretty rough the past couple seasons, but we are going to try to start to steer them in maybe a more favorable direction. I think they’ve actually already started to do that a little bit, which is great. Uh how are we going to do that? We’re going to be breaking down the roster, their salary cap situation, going over their draft picks and assets, making realistic trades, going through a mock draft, going through free agency, using realistic numbers and scenarios, all to try to make this ideal off seasonason. But hey, before we do that, make sure you guys like, subscribe, and comment. I’ve responded to every single comment to my YouTube channel up to this point, and I intend to keep on doing so. Ideal offseason is back. You’re obviously watching one right here. Go watch the other ones on the channel. They’re a lot of fun. on. It’s the most popular series on my channel by far. I think I’m really the only one on YouTube doing stuff like this. So, go give them a watch. Also, go go watch my Do They Fit in the NBA series videos. They get demonetized every single time. It’s really annoying and unfairly done. But, you know what? I like doing them and you guys like watching them, so who cares about the financial stuff? Let’s just keep having a good time together. So, yeah, let’s go talk about the Wizards. And that brings us back to the ideal offseason spreadsheet. For those of you new to the channel, this is a spreadsheet that I built to just to kind of help articulate and visualize the story of Ideal Offseason. If you want access to the spreadsheet, it’s really simple. Go down to the description of this video, join the Discord. Uh there’s a link there. It’s free. Just go hop on. Then you go to the announcements channel and the first link you’ll see there’s a free link to download the spreadsheet. Make your own stuff with it. Post it on the Discord. Have a bunch of fun. Let’s get down to business. The Washington Wizards have been one of the poverty franchises in the NBA for a long time. Um, this is a franchise and I’m sorry Wizards fans, let’s just get it all out in the open because I think that’s an important thing to uh do is to be honest during these series. Um, if you were to talk to NBA players, which I sometimes get the pleasure of doing, um, they’ll tell you there’s a couple teams they really don’t care to play for. One of them is the Washington Wizards. It’s pretty much chaos on the inside of this organization all the time, and there’s a reason they’re never good. Uh the last time you remember them being any sort of relevant was John Wall and Bradley Beal who those were two awesome talents that they were lucky enough to draft and then they didn’t really do much with those talents, right? There was nowhere for them to go. They weren’t able to put much of a team around them. They never really had much playoff success and those two honestly didn’t improve a ton in their time there anyway. I mean Bradley Beal was a very very good player. So was John Wall, but you never really got to see their games expand too much. John Wall isn’t actually in the NBA anymore due to injuries. But anyway, uh this last season, let’s do just a little bit of a recap for them. Uh we anticipated they’d be one of the worst teams in basketball last year. This was a tank for Cooper flag type of season. And unfortunately, the draft lottery happened and you fell to the sixth pick in the draft. Uh numerically that’s was kind of the most likely outcome, but it’s still uh it still sucks, right? It’s uh it’s unfortunate that that um happened to them. So, they were rolling out with three rookies that they had taken in the first uh round of last year’s draft. It wasn’t a very good draft class, but they had the number two overall pick, Alex Sar, who we expected to be a good defender and not much of an offensive player. That was proven to be true. He had a solid season, all rookie first team. You also had Bub Carrington, Carlton Carrington, and Keshan George here who, you know, didn’t have high expectations for anyway, but they had some solid moments during their rookie season. Um, a lot of this season was like, oh my god, this is so hard to watch like Jordan P and Kyle Kosma play together. You ended up moving Kyle Koosman. You brought in Chris Middleton. Very solid veteran player. And you also brought in Marcus Smart along the deadline and some really smart moves of helping teams uh just save on some cap space. And now all of a sudden the Wizards, they started to win a couple basketball games cuz they got some vets on the team to kind of help lead people. We talked about this with the Pistons. You need guys like this on the team when you’ve got all these young guys are trying to develop. There needs to be some leadership, some oncourt coaching, and just having a couple competent basketball players on the court went a long way for this team. Now, a lot of the success was happening in like March and April, and success is maybe even still maybe too big of a word to use for this team, right? But it looked a lot better. Again, March and April basketball in the NBA isn’t really real. Like, we’ve talked about that a lot on the channel. If you have questions about that, I’m happy to explain it in the comments, but this team did better position themselves. And for the first time in a while, this team was making some pretty smart moves. And so, that’s that was encouraging, right? Like, you did the right thing. Add those vets and you start to see a little bit of growth in the young guys. But where do we go now? Right? I mean, we’ve got a couple draft picks this year. We’ve got some young guys that we’re trying to give a little bit more playing time to, trying to get better. But also, we still don’t probably quite have that guy that gives us the confidence to be like, “Okay, we’ve got that 1A guy. Where do we go now? It’s time to start building up. No, we’re probably still not going to be a very good basketball team this year.” And I don’t intend to make this team a playoff team or anything like that. I don’t think they’ll even be close. We’ll probably be towards the bottom of the league again cuz we just we have to get that guy on this team and it’s unfortunate that you didn’t. But this is where we’re at. So, how are we going to do this? What are we doing for this off seasonason? Well, I want to start off by breaking down the roster. We’ll talk about who we have. Then we’ll go over the salary cap and then we’ll talk about draft assets and then we’ll start making some moves. So, let’s start off with the roster. Uh, for those of you new to these videos, ABC, what are these numbers right here? These are EPM numbers. EPM stands for estimated plus minus. It’s this really really advanced statistic that we have in basketball that gives you a number to represent how good somebody is at offense, defense, and then just overall as a player. And what I’ve gone and done is indexed those numbers that we can have a 0 to 100 scale as to how good somebody is at offense, defense, and just overall in the NBA in comparison to everybody else. So it it adds a little bit of context uh to each of these players. I’ll always say um with when it comes to any statistic, it does not tell the complete story. You need context. You need to be able to read into things. Like if you see, oh, such and such had a bad defensive season. Well, you can look around and say, well, like a lot of players on their team had a bad season. Maybe there’s something going on with the game plan there. Maybe just not having good defensive players around them made their job so much harder because it does, right? Those are all things that matter, but I like to keep them on the screen to add context to the story. Um, and it is a really good statistic. It’s extremely well thought through. you should go uh read about it. First guy on here, Chris Middleton. Um a guy that was injured for a lot of last season. Didn’t have a great like run when he was like with the Bucks last year and they ended up trading him for Koozma, which I think if you could ask Bucks fans, they would they’d be like, “Oh my god, please no. Give us back Chris Middleton. We’re so sorry.” And I understood the swing and everything. I I really did. But uh there was a chance that what happened happened and it did. Uh Chris Middleton played pretty well for Washington. He was kind of back to just getting his buckets, being just a solid overall player. You’ll see still in the upper echelon for offensive players, about league average defensively. Again, he was still kind of playing, just trying to get himself back into playing shape last year, so not really tripping about that too much. You probably don’t expect him to be quite the defender that he once was. But he’s got a one-year player option. I don’t see why he doesn’t opt into that. Maybe he does opt out and he wants to go take less money elsewhere, but nobody’s going to pay him nearly this much. So, I’d have to imagine he’s just kind of going to say, “All right, look, I’m going to be on Washington this year. I’m going to get my buckets, maybe try to raise my value, maybe I get bought out halfway through the year or something like that and I go sign with a contending player. I could see that happening, but for the time being, we we want to keep him around, right? We would love to keep Chris Middleton around. We want that veteran presence on the team for our young guys. Then we have Jordan Pool. Jordan Pool offensively was honestly pretty solid for them last year. I felt like he made um a lot of improvements. And you know, you know what’s funny cuz I I I always get a couple comments from people that don’t realize that like I have to watch basketball. I have to watch basketball. I do watch basketball like professionally for like my career and my job. A lot of it’s college uh because that’s where a lot of my clients are, but I do watch a lot of NBA stuff and I have to bill out my time as to like what I’m watching. The number one team I watched last year was the Wizards. Um so that was my number one team that I watched this last year. And uh part of that is I have a lot of connections within this organization, like probably more than any other team in the NBA, which that’s why I get to hear about some of the crazy things that go on here. But Jordan Pool overall when I was watching him last year, like I thought he was playing pretty solid basketball for the most part and for not really having a competent NBA team around him. Uh I thought he made a lot of improvements. Offensively, he’s awesome, right? We all know that. Defensively, me not not very good at all. You’ll see 15th percentile here. I’d like to think a full season of having competent people around him would mean that we can maybe have another solid season here. Is he going to be a long-term piece for this team? Almost certainly not. But there’s not really a reason to get rid of him either because when we have all these young guys on the team that are trying to figure out their roles in the NBA. Having a guy like Jordan Pool that teams can be like, “Okay, this is the primary guy we got to stop tonight, then we’re good.” and so nobody else like has to really get scouted and worried about. That gives guys like Sar Carrington, Keshan George uh a little bit more flexibility on the team. You want to keep a Jordan Pool type guy on the team. Uh Marcus Smart, another really important vet brought onto this team. He’s in the last year of his contract, so not a big deal either. Obviously elite defensively, uh offensively has his moments, right? Not always the greatest, not always the worst. Pretty pretty okay. And definitely an attitude culture guy we want to keep on the team. Him and Middleton, I I don’t want to do anything with them. them. They’re on the last year of their contract. I’d rather just keep them here because it’s going to raise the level of our other guys having them on the team. Cool. Cory Kispert just starting his new contract here. He’s got a fouryear uh looks like about 134ish million dollar a year contract. He’s been suffering as of late. The shooting was not great this last It’s not like it was bad. It’s just like you you expect him to be an elite shooter. He really wasn’t defensively. He doesn’t do much at all for you. I’m again going to hope that we can either move him somewhere else. I think it’s going to prove to be difficult. He’s at this like weird contract uh point where it’s like it’s not a little bit of money, but it’s it’s a decent amount of money. So, I don’t exactly know who’s going to be interested in that, but worst case scenario, like we’re not contending right now anyway, so I’m not tripping about it too much if he’s still on the team. Uh Rashawn Holmes only has 250K guaranteed on his contract. Uh he’s kind of just a big center that’s going to run, jump, and dunk. He’s strong as hell. I don’t really see a point in paying him $13ish million. I also don’t have a ton of roster spots left. So, I think what I would like to do is just take this uh 250k right here. And what we’ll do is we’re just going to put it here. Um so that uh we can mark that he’s getting his 250k. That’s still counting against the cap and everything, but we’re going to we’re going to let go of Rashawn Holmes here and take him off our depth chart just cuz there’s not really a point in keeping him around. I can go find us some other centers. Uh, now we have Alex Sar, second overall pick this last year. As we said, all rookie first team. Um, this is one of those where I’m going to say you have to look into the metrics a little bit with things. 6.3 on defense last year. Now, I’m not going to tell you he was elite defensively last year, but I’ll tell you he had a lot of elite moments defensively last year, and that’s all I can really ask for. He’s a rookie playing around a bunch of other bad defensive players cuz mind you, right, like Marcus Smart wasn’t here for most of the season. and he’s trying to figure out the NBA and some of the best other defenders on the team weren’t even like playing a whole bunch. So, um this is kind of one where I’m going to ask you to look past the statistic at least a little bit. Again, I’m not going to tell you it was perfect. He was a rookie, but a center that can switch on to multiple positions. His rotation speed is really, really good. Um a lot of the rim um protection was really good last year, so it’s something that we’re going to try to look past. Had some good offensive moments. Not that great still. Um but we didn’t expect that coming in, but really nice athletic center. I think can be uh good good in the long run as just a quality starting center. Uh Bal Koulabali’s got a team option. We’re going to accept that. He’s pretty solid defensively, offensively. He’s not quite figuring it out yet. I will say Kulibali again looks like he knows what he’s doing at all times, but again, maybe suffering from not having enough quality talent around him. Um I know I keep I I keep hitting on this, but think about it in Kate Cunningham terms, right? This was the first year where people are like, “Wow, Kate Cunningham is really good.” No, he’s always been this good. He just didn’t actually have NBA players on his team around him. So, it’s like what is he supposed to do? Have you ever gone to the gym and played pickup and this is me? Sometimes I go to play pickup and I’m quite a bit better than the average person playing pickup in basketball. And so, as soon as people figure out that I’m pretty good, I’ll get like double and triple teamed in a lot of things and if I don’t have people that can catch the ball on my team, I can’t really do that much. And so, that’s that’s what tends to happen. But, I have hope for Koulabali. Sadique Bay didn’t really play at all last season. He was injured. Maybe he’ll be a cheap 3 and D option for us this year. I guess we’ll see. Bub Carrington, um, again, numbers not great. He’s a rookie point guard. We’re not tripping about. He’s on a not so great team. He had some good moments where he’s playmaking a little bit, getting to that mid-range shot he likes so much. The three-point shot started to come around at points during the season, but we’re not going to judge him too hard until he has the opportunity to play with some better people this next year. Um, I I’d like my goal for him would be to start to see some improvement by the end of this season. Um AJ Johnson got him as a part of the Kyle Koosman trade as well. Another first round pick point guard. Extremely raw. Um extremely athletic. I don’t really know what his game is outside of just being very athletic. I’m not sure I see uh the pathway for him to being a great NBA player, but you know, this isn’t a guy we also expect to be good for another year or two anyway. And by good, I mean serviceable even. So, this is a long-term project. We’ll keep him around cuz why not. Keshan George, solid enough defensive player. And I’ll say I actually think his numbers maybe inflated a little bit just because there was a lot of moments and maybe it’s again stats can’t really find effort always. There was a lot of moments where Keshan George really pissed me off last year just because the effort was so bad. But then I have to remind myself this is a young guy. He’s been a winner his whole life. Now he’s going to the Washington Wizards and he’s just getting waxed every single night on national TV. Right. And that’s a hard thing for rookies to deal with. But overall he had some really good defensive moments. We hope that the three ball and maybe some of the ball handling comes around. I don’t really expect that second part quite as much, but we’ll see. We’ll let them keep developing. Then we’ve got these three down here, Anthony Gild, Justin Champeni, and Kobby Jones. All on non-g guaranteed contracts. You can see just by the numbers which one of these guys contributes a little bit, which one doesn’t. Justin, just like his brother for the Spurs. Um, actually kind of quietly one of the better role players uh in the NBA. So, I am going to guarantee his contract. Anthony Gil and Kobe Jones not really doing much for us. I’d rather have the roster spot, so we’re just going to be letting them go. So, that’s the roster breakdown. I know that’s a lot to kind of digest, but there’s a lot of context I feel like this team, so I want to be detailed with it. Let’s move over to the salary cap now. So, for those of you new to the channel, there are four levels to the NBA salary cap. If you want an in-depth explanation as to them, you can go down to my Phoenix Suns video down here. You can watch that. I go into much more depth about what these are, but here’s your brief run through. uh four levels. The first one, the cap space line. Once this number, which we are $15 million away right now, hits zero, that means we are over the cap. You can only resign your own players for anything more than a minimum contract. Um there are like exceptions to that and stuff. I’m not going to break all those down right now because there’s um those are a little bit more complicated. The next line, the luxury tax line. Once this number hits zero, your team gets way more expensive to operate. And then we have the first and second apron. Um, the first and second apron are newer to the NBA. They were put in place so that star players wouldn’t get traded as much. It brought brings a little bit of balance to the NBA. And so far, it has, which is uh, pretty cool. Basically, what happens once you start crossing these is the NBA starts to choke you out and say, “All right, if you’re if you think you’re that good and you want to pay this much to your team, then that’s it. You don’t really get to do anything else. You can’t sign these guys. You can’t trade like this. You can’t you can’t play these games anymore with us. The only way you can go is back down.” And that’s why you see teams like the Celtics most likely tearing down their team a little bit this year. So that’s a brief run through of it. We have a ton of cap space. We’re not going to be good. So I don’t want to be a luxury tax space team. So that’s where we got to operate is not crossing this threshold. Draft picks, we’ve got plenty of them. I will say there’s not necessarily a ton of quality in these picks outside of just having our own picks. I mean, maybe this Phoenix pick for next year where we can swap best with them will be good, but I have a hard time imagining will be worse than Phoenix. Um, or that Phoenix will be worse than us, I should say. But we do have quite a few assets going forward. I actually couldn’t even list all of them on here. And we’ve got three picks this year. I’m planning on using all of them again. Again, we just need talent on this team. This It scares me a little bit to know that we had four rookies on the team last year. I should take these guys off of here. We had four rookies on the team last year. We’re going to add three this year. That’s a lot for one team and that’s a lot for a coaching staff. And part of me wonders if that’s just a disservice to the group in general to have that many young guys and projects on the team. Like is that really helping Sar get better? Is that helping Bub Carrington get better? Right. Keshan George. I don’t I don’t know. Even Kulabali, right? A guy that we should be focusing on developing because he’s an interesting player. Well, I don’t know. But I also know like none of these guys should be considered completely untouchable either, right? And so I shouldn’t just bank on them. I need to keep taking swings and hope that we find something, right? So, that’s kind of the idea. What are we doing for the rest of this? Well, uh I’m not going to lie, strategy-wise, this team isn’t in a very bad spot at all. Like, we’re we’re intending to not be very good because we want to be able to use our first round pick next year and hopefully get like uh we we don’t know who’s going to be the first and second pick next year, but maybe they’re going to be really good players and we’d like a shot at them, right? So, we can start building around those guys, right? Um, but we also want to make sure that our young guys are getting on the court a little bit more and stuff. We want to make sure we have some vets on the team to support them. And we kind of already have a lot of this in place. Um, so I think what we’re going to do is this might be a simpler video. We might not make a ton of moves here cuz I don’t really think we need to. Like I’m going to explore a Cory Kispert trade. I’m gonna see if there’s not some ways we can’t like move like maybe up in the second round just a little bit to try to get a little bit better of a player. Um, but otherwise like I don’t think a ton of moves need to be made. Like let’s just keep this team cheap. Let’s roll them out next year. Let the young guys play, keep the vets on the team until maybe a point in the season where they want to be bought out or something else. But let’s let’s keep them here for the time being to help our guys. So let’s move forward to the trade portion of the video. All righty. That brings us back here to Fanso. Fanspo is a really cool website where you can do a bunch of things like use the uh the trade machine, go through mockdrafts. I got a bunch of other tools and resources here. I’m not sponsored. I just think it’s a cool website. Uh before we do the trades, did you just skip the last like 15 to 16 minutes of this video, the whole intro where I gave you all the background and strategy we’re going to use in this video. I will punch you if you don’t go back. I will find you and hit you hard brass knuckle style, pimp slap backhand. I don’t care. No, I’m just I’m just playing with you. I mean, maybe maybe you’ll see me on the street. I don’t know. But go watch go watch the last part of that video. It’s important. I know 65% of you normally skip it, so it’s it’s important context. Try to try to have a little bit of attention span cuz uh why not? I don’t know. Um anyway, trades. What are we working with tradewise in this video? Well, we’ve got four open roster spots right now and we’ve got three draft picks that we would like to use and maintain. We need to figure out though, how many free agents are we bringing back as well? Is there anybody from the team last year that we’d like to bring back? Well, Chris Middleton, we already talked about that. Brogden’s not coming back. Um, it’d be cool to have him back, but I don’t think he’s coming back. I think he’s going to go somewhere else. Tristan Vukachic, I believe that’s the pron the right pronunciation. I actually like his game a decent amount, and I think he’s an interesting player. So, and he’d be cheap. So, as much as it would not be the greatest to bring in another young guy on this team, I kind of want to hold a roster spot for him uh just in case uh we’re able to um have an opportunity to bring him back. So, I am going to put Mr. Vukachic right here. You can see offensively actually pretty interesting. Defensively, but I don’t know. Like, I’m I’m just going to hold him here in case we have an open roster spot cuz I wouldn’t mind bringing him back. So, what this is telling us is we have to be sending out the same amount of players as we’re bringing back. If something good transpires, then whatever. Um, okay. Again, as we mentioned in the previous part of the video, I don’t think there’s a ton of moves that need to be made here. If you’re confused by that, again, you didn’t watch the other part of the video, so I don’t know what to tell you. you’re a So, I’ve I’ve I’ve thought about this a little bit and the one thing that I would like to explore is a Cory Kisser trade. He feels like he just kind of isn’t needed on this team. There’s a couple other people here. Now, spots could open up if Chris Middleton gets bought out, if Marcus Smart gets bought out, which those are entirely plausible. The other thing is is we we’re going to be a very important team for people in this next year just because uh it’s really hard for people to get traded. you need third teams to come in and absorb salary all the time. So Cory Kispert is going to be a a valuable thing in that where he can make certain trades happen. Like I could totally see a Drew Holiday trade or a Porzingis trade happening between like two teams and then us and Cory Kisspert’s involved in that somehow. So that’s why I I don’t just want to seek out a Cory Kisspert trade. I want to kind of keep them here as a way to either kind of help maneuver some of those trades, move salary around, things like that. But we’ll take a look and see if there’s anything obvious. Um, one really simple move that I I think we should do is we should call up the Boston Celtics and say, “Look, they’re trying to save every single dollar that they can right now, right?” Uh, they have one guy here that’s sneakily not quite a minimum contract in Xavier Tillman for this next year. And I think what we could do is we can give them actually an okay role player that we don’t necessarily need. We can take on Tilman because, you know, why the hell not? We could use another big on the team um behind SAR and we can use this as a way to say hey you can save a little bit of money. You can get a cheap player to throw in your rotation next year which is what you’re going to need. And I know that you have a second round pick that I wouldn’t mind taking back. It’s our own second round pick. You bastards. Give it back. So here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking we take Xavier Tilman here. Send him over here. Right. 2.5. We’ve got Justin Champeni at 2.3. Three years. You can have this guy on your team at 23 years old, pretty solid player overall in the NBA. Solid contributor on both ends of the court. Next three years, cheap. You’re looking for guys like this. That’s that’s gold mine to you. He can be your new maybe Sam Hower or something next year. We send him over there, right? We’re just going to take Tilman in and then wave him at the end of the year. We just we just don’t need Champenny. I got other guys at the positions that I’d rather play more this year. It’s nothing against him. What I want to do is I want to move up eight spots in the second round to go get me a better second round talent or technically like a late first round guy. So, I want my pick back. You can have the 40th pick back because these second round picks are still important to the Celtics here. We’re really not saving them that much money, but Champi is going to be valuable to them long term. Um, and they still want that second round pick because it’s another cheap way for them to fill out their roster this season as the Celtics are just trying to be as cheap as possible. So, this is kind of just a win-win overall for them. We get to move up and uh take a better swing at somebody this year and then we just free up a little bit of cap space at the end of the season. Really not a big deal. I just want the opportunity to draft um a little bit better because this is a pretty good draft class and there should be some pretty solid players available at the end of the uh first round that we would like to capitalize on. Uh because again, I think it’s a pretty good draft. So, this trade works. It’s a pretty simple one. Um so, that’s the first thing I’d like to do. So Champeni is now Mr. Xavier Tilman Senior here who wow, he was the 0 percentile on offense this last year. Oh my god. Well, that’s rough. That’s rough. But you know what? That’s where he is on the team nowadays. Maybe it’s not the worst thing to have Vauachic on the roster this next year. Look, he’s not going to be that great. Is his contract guaranteed? Actually, can I can I take a look at this contractwise? Uh Where is his does it say? One second. Okay. Yeah, his contract isn’t guaranteed. So that’s or it is guaranteed. Excuse me. So we we will just keep him on the roster. It’s not a big deal. We’ll take a backup big for the season. We’re not intending to be good anyway. So now we have our own second round pick back. This is now pick 32. Great. I’m happy with that first move. After that, I really only have a couple ideas. Um, we could take another swing at like a younger talent. So, here’s We’ve mocked out this trade a couple times, not in this exact fashion, but the Cavs are another team that need to dump salary, right? They need to dump salary. Isaac Aoro is an interesting 24 year old player. Plays pretty good defense, can shoot the ball a little bit. He’s at least played around some other professionals before, which is always uh useful. Um, and he can play a little bit and he can play defense, right? And look, we just we don’t got much defense going on here. It’d be nice if Alex Sar didn’t have to do like everything for us. Like whether it’s a and by everything, obviously, he still didn’t have a great defensive season, but it’s either a block or we just don’t get a stop at all. Wouldn’t mind getting another guy out there, but the question is like where’s where would he fit in in this rotation, right? Well, Chris Middleton might not be there the whole season. you want to get George and Kulabali out there quite a bit and we’d swap Sadi Bay. So, I do think there’s a spot for him in this. So, I wouldn’t mind doing something like this and this is it. It’s pretty simple, right? The Cavs need to just take back less money. They need to start saving money in some moves. Um Isaac Aoro is kind of one of those odd guys out. It’s only two years for him at 24, so we’re not going to be competitive in the next two years anyway. We take back Isaac Aoro. We send them back Sadi Bay, ideally similar type of player. We we’re making a big assumption that he’s healthy and ready to go. Uh but we send him back here for way way cheaper. And in this instance, do we really have to give them much else? I think we should give them a little bit here because Aoro is a bit better of a player. And here’s the other thing uh with it. We have a lot of second round picks in 2026. Uh we don’t want to be in a position as a team where we’ve got too many draft picks at one time. Having draft picks is good, but having them at all at one time is actually a negative thing. Um cuz think about it. If you’re talking to a team like us and we’ve got only four open roster spots next year and we have six draft picks, well, there’s not a lot of leverage in that cuz we can’t roster all those players anyway. And teams are going to be like, well, either you trade with us or you just can’t do anything with these picks and you just have to send these guys overseas or something, right? That’s not that’s not advantageous to us at all. So, we want to move back some of these second round picks. And I think that that’s okay. Like, Aoro is a solid enough player that we’re getting back to where look, we’re saving you some money. We can give you some of these 2026 second round picks. Um, this is a really complicated one. Like, there you go. You can have that, send it back to the Cavaliers, and then is there another one involved in this? I don’t necessarily know. I feel like just the money alone and Sadiq Bay could be solid. Uh I don’t know. You make the case in the comments whether or not you think there should be another second round pick included in that. I don’t necessarily think you need to. And also these second round picks are going to be valuable to them because it’s cheap ways again to fill out the back end of their roster as they’re going to have an expensive team. So I think I think that this is fine. This trade should work financially. Cool. Everybody’s happy. If you think I should put another second round pick in it, I could I could justify that, too. I could totally see that. So, Sadique Bay is now Mr. Aoro here, which again, okay, we’ve added a solid basketball player to the team. This is this is good. This it’s not going to win us a ton of basketball games, but it’s better than uh what we had. So, maybe maybe I’ll put George here. Don’t worry about the depth chart too much. This is more for me to visualize kind of where everybody is. Like uh so don’t don’t read into it too much. Like once every video I get a comment being like, I can’t believe ABC you put Jaden Ivy as the backup point guard and not the starting shooting guard. Guess what? I don’t give a Just move on. Nobody cares. This isn’t 2K. Shut up. H I’ve also gotten a lot of comments saying people like when I’m being extra sassy, so I feel more comfortable doing that. Um but anyway, okay. I like that. My question now is cuz I don’t really feel the need to make much else of a move right now. I already explained the Cory Kisspert thing. I just don’t know who I would go and get for him. I went and looked through the numbers a little bit before this and I don’t know who I’m going to go get. like who am I saving from paying money to? I was like, could it be Kell Johnson? I don’t I don’t really know if that makes a ton of sense for like the Spurs. I don’t know. I I I looked at a couple names like a Zack Collins or something, but I don’t know who wants to take on the long-term money of this right now. So, I think I’m just going to hold on to him and use him in a three team trade at some point during the season to help some other big move take place. Um, so the only other thing I might do is I might because uh this second round pick is no longer here. I might push back one of my other second round picks um to someone that could use it more this next season just because um look how do I how do I explain this best? Some of there if I could talk teams like OKC they make one or two trades like this every year, right? or they push their assets further down the line in order to better position themselves and they don’t lose leverage on those draft picks, right? So, you you just look at their transaction history. They normally do like one or two of those a year. I kind of want to do one of those just cuz we have so many of these picks through 2026, 2027. I don’t want these to become just like stale assets that we can’t really utilize. So, I’m wondering is there a good team that could use these picks as soon as like next year or something like that? Like the Lakers, do they have like They don’t have a future second round pick. So, no, that one’s not going to work as much. Like Denver, do they have a future second? No, they have no seconds. Oh, man. Denver is a tough one. The Clippers potentially. They have one. No, they have a couple 2026 picks already. Could it be like a Golden State? What do they have for 2026 picks? They don’t have any. Minnesota holds the swap rights to this 2031 one. We’ve traded for this 2030 second round pick before cuz like the Warriors like by 2030 you have to imagine they’re kind of done by then, right? That could be a valuable pick to us. So, what do we have for other 2026 picks? We have the right to swap um or what do we have? We have Chicago’s pick. They could be ass. Phoenix could be ass. And we have our own. These are all actually pretty good second round picks. So, we might just do a one for one swap. Or we could push some of our 2027s out now. But I’m not as worried about those. We could do one of those during the season if we need to. I think what we do cuz Phoenix is going to try to at least be good next year. I think we give them the Phoenix pick um this next year. We send that over to the Warriors here. And then are there any bad 2027s that we don’t want? What do we have for 2027 picks? We have a Brooklyn or Dallas one. Okay. We have a Golden State or Phoenix. Uh we have Chicago’s which is protected at that point but whatever. We have our own. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Um I feel like we have to give them one other pick to get this 2030 pick cuz uh that’s the one that I want. So let me just send this over to us right now. I think what I’ll do is I’ll throw in this Brooklyn or Dallas one for 2027. I’d like to hold on to um theirs cuz I have to imagine they’ll still be competitive at this or you know what? No, we’ll give them theirs back for that exact reason. So let’s let’s send that back to them here. And then this is just a really simple trade of just uh moving some assets further down the line to make sure that we still have good value in our current picks. So now we’ve moved on from this pick right here and we’ve moved on from this pick right here. So now we have a Warriors. And again, I know it’s out of order, but just take my word for it. 2030 second round pick. Cool. Um I think that that’s pretty good for trades right now. I know it’s not the sexiest thing in the world, but I think this roster is kind of where it wants to be for the most part. I like that we were able to add a Cororo and we were able to move up in the draft a little bit so we can go get another fun player or something like that. I’m starting to think Vukachic isn’t going to make the roster at this point. I feel like we’re going to need like a veteran big or we might end up even drafting a big on here. So, I’m going to say we now have four open roster spots um to work with. But, let’s um let’s move on to the draft. All righty. So, that brings us back to the Fan Spo Mockdraft Simulator and here we are with the sixth pick. So, we haven’t talked much about draft strategy in this video at all. And that’s because we are in a kind of tough situation, right? I do think that there’s a world where the Wizards trade back. I really do. I think that maybe you could justify calling up Toronto and saying, “Hey, let’s swap some things. Um, we we’ll get some more assets or something.” But I think it’s a little bit complicated because the picks like five, six, seven, eight, and nine are all very similar level players in this draft. Maybe more so like 5, six, seven, and eight, I would say. Um, so you’re not really getting like a ton of value for this. So I’d rather just have my for sure pick as to who I want in this draft. And the thing is, who do we want, right? Who do we want? So, um, funny enough, I I’ve got some like real life intel on this that I’ve acquired, which is, um, interesting to say the least. Um, so I’m going to try not to use any of that bias on this. And like, I’m not saying that that’s for sure what they’re going to do or whatever. I just happen to have a pretty good idea as to what their board looks like. Um, so take that as you will. I’m not even saying that I’m I’m employed by this team even. And I’m never going to tell you guys who I’m employed by, but um you guys can try to figure it out yourselves, I guess. What do we want? What do we want? Um Sar is the I think the most kind of for sure prospect that we have on this team right now. Guys like Bub Carrington, AJ Johnson, Keshan George, Kulibali, um all interesting, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like I’m above taking people at their position. When I look at the point guard spot, I’m like, “Oh we’ve already got like two guys there.” And AJ Johnson, I’m not even sure he’s really capable of playing point guard. Um, he could be more of an offball guy. I’m just I’m not huge on AJ Johnson personally. I know he’s fun and like energetic, but man, he does not know what he’s doing basketball-wise out there right now. And that’s okay. He’s young. He’s going to figure it out. But looking at who we have available, we have Jeremiah Fears, who debatably could come in and play day one as a starting point guard. I’m not sure that’s would be ideal for him. uh thus the ideal offseason. But what would you get out of him is a shot creator day one. A guy that’s going to try to play some offense on a team that is a little bit Well, look, we’re lackluster all around. You can see the numbers here. Like look, this is a butt booty buns team for the most part. But um he would he would just be allowed to go get some buckets, which is cool, right? That’s very cool. You could look at Malawatch and say, “Hey, why not just have two of these centers?” Like we could go kind of twin towers. Like Sar is pretty athletic. maybe he can play more of a forward. Um, I don’t like that idea for the reason of the best thing Sar does is protect the rim. Uh, be a switch defender, things like that. I feel like you take him out of what makes him his best if you go and add another center to this and vice versa to Malawatch as well. So, I don’t think that benefits either of them quite as much. Coniple maybe more of a safe pick that you could go with here to be like, hey, um, we’re just going to get a wing that can kind of shoot the ball. Uh, we know he’s going to be solid. Maybe not as high of upside. Um, but this is a tough one, right? This is a tough one. I think what we’re going to do, just looking at this roster, is like, look, Jordan Pool is going to have the ball a lot during this season anyway. Marcus Smart could as well. I’m not going to trip about um um the fact that we would have a lot of young point guards on the team, just because again, we do have other options here should we really need to have somebody more competent with the basketball. I think I’d rather just go get a guy that I can kind of throw out there and let him just be the offense that he wants to be in Jeremiah Fears. And look, he’s younger. He’s got pretty good size. I I don’t really buy the whole like elite athleticism thing. He’s more of a Spencer Denwitty type to me, but he can create for himself right now. He’s got a couple moves. He’s hit some big shots. I I think we want to go Jeremiah Fears here and um just hope that maybe he can be the point guard this next year. All righty. So Jeremiah Fears would get this much money. he would get a four-year deal. And like look, may maybe it’s Bub Carrington next year. I don’t know. I’m I’m gonna put fears there just because I think he could be uh better. I I always feel bad saying that though cuz like I when a guy’s never played in the NBA before and somebody that has, there’s just there just is a vast difference between the two. Um but I don’t know. I’m cool with putting fears there for the time being. I’m really just comment generating right now so people could be like Bub Carrington Bub Carrington would so start over Jeremiah fears. Look at this stupid conversation you’re having on the internet. It literally does not matter. I’m really turning up the sassis video because I have so much to do today. I’ve already recorded like two other videos. Um, okay. We take Jeremiah Fears and now we’ve got another pick coming up. I think it’s like pick 18, right? I believe that’s what we have. Yeah, we’ve used the six pick. Now we’re on to the 18th. And again, I think we’re swinging for some upside right now. Who is available? Okay, here’s what we got. There’s some interesting ones here. Interesting. So, we have Yaore here. Who who just got picked? Ah, Carter Bryant almost fell to us. That would have been a cool one. Uh, Cedric Coward might have been kind of interesting. I don’t know. Um, by the way, who ended up taking who? Um, yeah, I could see a lot of this happening. Yeah, that’s pretty interesting. Who did my Bulls take? Ah, damn. Anyway, Jagor is definitely a longerterm prospect. Um, he wants to have the ball in his hands a lot. I feel like we’ve got enough of those projects right now, so I think I’m going to pass on him. Will Riley, freshman forward, pretty athletic. Uh, kind of similar to Keshan George. It feels a little bit repetitive to me, so I think I’m going to pass there as well. You look at Anique Clifford, a little bit older guy, maybe could come in and just be like a solid contributor for us right away. Um, again, maybe a bit of a loaded position, but, you know, we’ve got a lot of projects everywhere right now. And that’s kind of the thing with having this many guys is like, okay, when do when do people get the playing time? Um, so if I’m going to presume that maybe a Cory Kisser gets moved at some point, maybe a Marcus Smart gets bought out, maybe a Chris Middleton gets bought out, I can justify a Nick Clifford and saying like, okay, I’m going to get an okay defensive player. He’s going to rebound hard. He’s kind of the Josh Hart type if you would. Um, can put the ball on the floor a little bit if needed. I don’t think he’s got NBA ball handling skills. I could go with Fleming to add a little bit more size and maybe defensive intangibles to things, which I think could be interesting. You’re not taking as much upside here, though. And this is another guy that doesn’t really create for himself. This is a guy that plays off of others, which I actually value a decent amount just because I think there’s a lot of guys that want the ball, but not as many that can actually um play off of others. So, there’s, you know, it might might limit the upside, but maybe he can contribute a little bit more right away. and we don’t really have that kind of true lengthy power forward that he’s got good defensive intensity, right? He’s a little bit more mature, ready to play right away. So, I don’t I don’t hate that pick. Uh you could go with Ray No and go and get another uh younger center. Not sure I really want to do that. You could go with another guard, but that doesn’t really scream anything all that interesting to me. So, I think what I want to do actually is I think I want to take Rashir Fleming. It just feels like a position that we don’t quite really have yet and a different skill set. So, I think I want to take Fleming. Rashir Fleming. There we go, my boy. We’ll throw you there. That’s how much money you’d get. Four years. And we’ll just put him there for the time being. I don’t really care. Um, okay. I like that. I like that. It’s not as much of an upside swing, but maybe maybe it add maybe by the end of this we have like a decent defensive front court or something like that, right? We’ve got a couple interesting options of guys. And I know Kulibali, does he really play this position? Not quite, but that’s where I put him just for visual sake. Um, okay. So, we took Rashier Fleming. Now, we have the 32nd pick. We’ve got our own pick back. So, we can get somebody kind of solid here um if the right person falls to us. So, I’m curious as to who that is going to be. Okay, what do we got? What do we got? What do we got? Uh we have Ben Sif here, who again, guy that wants the basketball. Um going to take a little bit of time to develop. He’s been playing pro ball already, which is cool. He starts offense really well. Doesn’t always finish offense very well. So again, it’d be another kind of ball handling project and I kind of don’t want to do that cuz I want to give these guys a fair chance to be able to do that, right? So probably going to pass for that reason. I could go with Fiero here who is he’s just an athlete. He he could be playing any sport for all I care. Like he is just 68, strong and athletic. Doesn’t do much else on the basketball court. Like you presume he’ll be at least okay defensively because of that, but h not so sure. Um, but again, solid athlete, solid size. When you look at what we have out here, not the biggest forward. There’s size here and here. So, and like Aoro plays bigger than himself a lot of times. So, I don’t feel like I need that, but it is more of an upside swing. Hugo Gonzalez pretty solid smart basketball player. He played a lot of offball cuz he’s been playing with pros already. Um, that’s kind of an interesting one. Just kind of looking where else you could go with a filing Cam Jones, Kobe Brea, who we take in like every draft. I think I’m going to pass on that. Um I could just go and get another big as well to come off the bench cuz right now it’s just Tilman and Sar. I think I’d rather just go get a vet center to kind of pair with all of them. I I’d like to have one more vet on this team especially. So I think I’ll pass on like a Janai Broom, Hansen Yang, uh guys like that and Kulk Brener as I’m just not a huge fan of. So, I think I I like Hugo Gonzalez like solid enough athlete. Shy can shoot the ball a little bit. He’s very Mario Hisoniaish uh type of player. Um which again, you have to develop him correctly. And this is more of an upside swing, but for the 32nd pick, like I think we’re getting pretty good value for that. So, I think I’m going to take uh going to take Hugo. All righty. So, we throw Mr. Hugo on here. He’d get about this much money. I can give him the four years. Cool. Throw him throw him here. Why the hell not? Awesome. All righty. That’s the That’s the draft. It’s not exactly what we wanted, is it? But I don’t I don’t think this team can trade up into the top four anyway. If an opportunity presents itself, great. I think you should. Um but otherwise, like this is probably the best we can do. I think Fierce has some decent upside. I think Gonzalez does as well. The most important thing is we’re going to be getting the guys that we took last year out on the court just a little bit more this year anyway. But uh we do have a roster spot still open. We need another big on this team. Let’s go on to free agency. All righty. Free agency. Vu Vauachic. We’re going to have to respectfully decline. I just I need a more veteran big on the team for Sar to learn from. Um that’s not Xavier Tilman. So, it’s whatever. We’ll see if Tilman lasts the whole season, right? It is what it is. Let’s go find Let’s go find a center for us. Um who are we going to bring in? Uh Clinkapellino, Steven Adams? No, there’s no way he’s coming here. Mo Vagner, Al Horford, there’s no way. Cavan Looney, I doubt it. Um who we bringing in? We could just do the typical Mason Plumbley ad that we always do. Aldama would be great. Not sure he’s going to leave that team. Don Sharp. Again, I’d like someone a little bit more um mature. Somebody that’s been around a little bit more. Tony Bradley, Paul Reed. No, not quite who I’m thinking. Alex Len, anything but that, please. No, don’t do that to me, please. Let’s take a look at like power forwards because sometimes they put some other center type players there. Chris Buchet. Interesting. What are we working with? like uh we could use like a mid-level exception or something on like a Chris Buchet and that wouldn’t be the worst thing. Just for reference, here’s some of uh uh Chris Buché’s numbers this last year. Um offensively, like not that bad or honestly pretty good overall in terms of like EPM performance. And then defensively, not all that great, but I don’t know. It’s not a bad option at least. He’s not like the center exactly that I want this. Why am I here? I want to be here. Um, so that’s not exactly who I want. Larry Nance. Larry Nance would be kind of interesting. He’s at least been around the block a little bit. I could He’s not going to command much more than a minimum, right? I can use part of the exceptions, part of the mid-level exceptions to bring him in. Maybe I give him like just like one last payday, like one year, like 5 $6 million or something. Could we call it like five and a half? Nobody else is going to give him that. So, I I say we bring in Larry Nance. I think that that’s a solid option here. he can try to play himself back into uh another contract. So, let’s bring in Larry here. I know he didn’t have a great season. He was kind of hurt this last year, but he’s he’s been around the block. He’s played enough center in his day. His dad was an NBA player as well. So, not a bad option. Let’s give him part of our exception. So, let’s go 55 is kind of what I’m thinking. There’s Larry Nancy. He gets a one-year deal to kind of try and prove himself. We thankfully get to move Xavier Tilman back. And we can move Larry Nance Jr. right here. And this right here is your 2025 2026 Washington Wizards. Let’s recap. Ew. It’s It’s not great, but that’s kind of the point, right? Um it’s it’s not going to be um great. Let’s get rid of these picks. What did we do? Well, we’re rolling out basically the same team because they’re really not in such a bad spot. They’ve got some vets on the team that we’re okay with keeping. We’ve got kind of that uh main scoring option in Jordan Pool, which is a good thing, right? We don’t want to roll out Fears and Sar and uh Kulabali and these guys and say, “All right, you got to find a way to generate 20 points a night for us.” No, like let’s let’s let Jordan P kind of be the guy that people game plan for a little bit. Let them kind of find their way with things. Uh we’ve got a lot of young guards on the team, so he’ll have the ball for most of it. We did successfully move some of our picks back, which is good. That’s going to help us kind of maintain value of our draft picks going forward. We added another kind of vet in the team in Larry Nance. uh we were able to move up in the draft to go get like a Hugo Gonzalez who we think could be interesting and maybe Rashier Fleming makes the rotation a little bit earlier than um the average like 18th overall pick does. We also picked up an Isaac Aoro which should just be a very solid player for us to have on the basketball court. We don’t want to be that bad. We want to have NBA players on the court cuz otherwise nobody’s getting better, right? Cuz you’re just out there playing with bums every day and it’ll be it’ll be tough. Um, we kept Cory Kispert because we presume that somebody’s going to want to use us in a three-teamer at some point and he could be a guy that we could use. And if not, whatever. It’s not a big deal. We’re not paying anyone else anyway. We’re still $23 million away from the luxury tax, right? So, not a huge deal. O overall, we’re trying to stink this next year and hopefully get the the guy that we’re looking for longterm then. But hey, you guys let me know your comments down below. Let me know what you think. I’m always down to have the discussion. But yeah, let’s move on to the comments of the video. All righty, y’all. The comment of the video is coming from our San Antonio Spurs ideal offseason video here. Go give it a watch. It’s been doing very very well performance-wise along with the other Ideal Offseason videos. So, please go give uh them a watch. Go give the do they fit in the NBA series videos a watch as well cuz they always get demonetized. It’s really annoying. But if you guys like them and I like making them, then let’s keep pumping them out. Uh but the comments of the video comes from Nova Goto game that said, “I watched 12 minutes of Team Breakdown and so should you.” This one’s probably a little bit longer, but watch it. It gives you context. What else do you have to do in a day? Just listen to something. Uh, no, it’s it’s whatever. If you skip it or whatever, I just think you’re going to be missing context and then you’re going to leave me a stupid comment. So, I appreciate you, Nova, for doing so. It’s also good for my watch time. It helps the channel out a ton. So, thank you very much. But, as always, uh, go join the Discord. Link is in the description here. Uh, you can just click this link. It’s free. Go join the Discord. It’s how you get access to the ideal offseason spreadsheet. you’ll see in the announcements channel there. Uh there’s a free link to download it there. So, hop on, have a good time, post what you make or just keep it to yourself and uh do it while while you’re supposed to be working or in school or something. I don’t care. I don’t know what you guys do in your free time. But anyway, I appreciate you guys as always. We’ll talk later. Thanks so much. Bye. [Music]

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————————————————Video Contents————————————————
00:00 – Intro
01:40 – Team Breakdown
18:49 – Trades
32:55 – Draft
43:10 – Free Agency
47:15 – Comment Of The Video