}
It’s never easy to find success in the NBA. Putting together a competitive squad may take years, especially if you’re not from a big market that could be enticing to free agents.
Needless to say, that has made some franchises enter a bit of a loop of struggles. They have a couple of bad seasons, get some high draft picks, and they either waste them on players that never fulfill their potentials o they land a superstar and fail to surround him with elite talent.
That seems to be the situation with both the Washington Wizards and the Brooklyn Nets, a couple of teams that haven’t had any truly elite player in almost two decades.
Don’t get me wrong, they have had their fair share of stars in that span, but none of them have stood out from the rest of the pack and won an individual award.
As a matter of fact, they’re the only two franchises in the NBA that haven’t won any individual awards in 20 years. The last time a Wizard won an award was Gheorghe Muresan in 1996, who was the league’s Most Improved Player. For the Nets, their last individual award came at the hands of Derrick Coleman, the league’s 1990-91 Rookie of the Year.
Perhaps some may argue that most of the awards always come to bigger markets and they’d be right. But still, twenty years and not even a Sixth Man of the Year award to show for it? that seems off.
Luckily for the Nets, they’ve been doing an outstanding job assembling their squad lately. With Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant, DeAndre Jordan, and Spencer Dinwiddie, they have perennial candidates for MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, and Sixth Man of the Year.
The same can’t be said about the Wizards and their recent struggles but hey, maybe once John Wall comes back and they start competing again, either he or Bradley Beal could put an end to the drought.
