Washington Wizards 2026 Season Preview
Season overview for the 2025 2026 Washington Wizards. Now, this is going to be another year of development for the Wizards, which they’re probably not too mad about because they do have their first round pick, top eight, protected this year. Basically, if it lands outside of the top eight, they could potentially have their pick swapped with the Phoenix Suns pick. They have all the reason to want the team to not be like amazing this upcoming season, obviously. And if they land in that top eight, I’m sure they’ll be very happy. The big thing that they have to keep an eye on obviously is going to be that this is going to be another year of development for the younger players on the roster as they start to come into their own a bit more. That includes the Bub Carringtons and his natural progression as a young point guard. Even though he was showing some flashes at the end of next season, it’s time to see what he can do with a little bit more ball handling duties. Then there’s obviously last year’s number two overall pick in Alex Zar. He needs to get better at pretty much all of the big man things. You know, improved efficiency around the rim, rebounding, defense. He loves to shoot the ball outside the paint, but he also can’t shoot that well. So, yeah, that’s a skill that he’s going to want to continue to develop, but at the end of the day, I think he needs to get that solid foundational base on the things that are really going to keep him on the court at all times. And then there’s obviously Bal Koulibali who has shown flashes as a playmaker himself, but is obviously going to be the person that’s going to be most important when it comes to this defense and like instilling that defensive mentality that the rest of the team kind of needs real bad. And then obviously they traded for Cam Whitmore who is actually a hometown kid. So it’ll be interesting to see Cam Whitmore in a situation where he actually will have a chance to really show what he can do, you know, at the end of the day. So, the other thing that the Wizards are going to be focused on this upcoming season is definitely going to be doing what they’ve been doing for the last few seasons with them picking up Chris Paul, with them picking up Dus Jones, with them picking up Marcus Smart, even though that didn’t actually work out with them actually trading him for something else. Even Jordan P could kind of fit in this category even though he probably had more of an opportunity to actually stay with this team than any of the other players I mentioned. But the two players that they’re going to be looking at this season is obviously CJ McCullum and Chris Middleton. They want to see if these players can build up a little bit of that value and they could ship them off at the trade deadline to a contender that could obviously use a little bit of scoring from either of them. And since the Wizards are still very much in the developmental stage, it’ll be ideal for them to continue grabbing a couple bad contracts here and there and just having them on the team because one, they need the sizable contracts on the roster just to reach the salary floor. And two, because it allows them to get more assets to add to the team, whether that’s a second round pick here, second round pick there, if they’re lucky, a first round pick. But I don’t know if you’re getting a first round pick for an expiring CJ McCullum or Chris Middleton. Who do I see as the potential breakout player for the Wizards this year? Now, they have a lot of options here. I wanted to go with Bal Kulabali at first, but I’m going to go ahead and say Bob Carrington because he had a really strong stretch at the end of last season where he was averaging 15.4 points per game on 48% from the field in his last 10 games. So, if he can spread that out for a full season, maybe not all the way up to 48% from the field, but if he can do that on a cool 45%, I think that’ll be a nice big step forward for him into being potentially the the future lead ball handler on this team. But like I said, they definitely do want to still land in that top eight because they’re not 100% sure if they have that one player that they want to build around just yet. And next off season, the draft is supposed to be another one of the really good ones. It’ll be interesting to see what ends up playing out here with the Washington Wizards, but for now, I have them as the number 30 team in the league this year.
Kash talks about the upcoming 2026 season for the Washington Wizards
