The Washington Wizards set themselves up for the 2026-27 NBA season and beyond by making a series of midseason trades in the 2025-26 season, where the franchise ended the year with the worst record in the league (17-65).
The Wizards acquired Trae Young in December 2025 to ensure a former All-Star point guard would run their offense going forward, but a bigger move was yet to come. In February 2026, the Wizards decided to acquire Anthony Davis from the Dallas Mavericks after Davis spent most of the season out with injury.
Davis didn’t make his Wizards debut this season, as the team elected to let him get surgery on his hand to ensure he could make his debut in October 2026 as the franchise hopes to climb out of the bottom of the East with the Young-Davis duo leading the way.
Davis recently appeared on the ‘Glass Half Full’ show with NBC’s Craig Melvin, where he was asked if it’s tough to join a losing team when you’re a winning player. The 2020 NBA Champion shared a thoughtful answer while sharing a blunt truth about where the Wizards currently are as an organization.
“Everybody knows this, I’ve told the owner this. When you’re looking at the Wizards, from the outside looking in, everybody is right. But when you get into the organization and see how great it is, the owner is amazing, the city, DC, is amazing. Very bad basketball team for sure, it’s very tough to go from a bad team to a championship contender. It takes time. That’s for anybody. So it takes time, it takes a couple of years.”
This was the second time Davis was traded in a year, going from the LA Lakers to the Mavericks before Dallas decided to send him to the Wizards. The 2024 Olympic Gold medalist made it clear in his interview with Melvin that his career goals still include winning another championship, a league MVP, and Defensive Player of the Year.
If the Wizards run him as their No. 1 option and they have a season worthy of a top seed in the East, Davis might receive buzz for MVP. He’d need to have a generational production season to make this happen, so it’s probably not going to happen on the Wizards next season.
Davis averaged 20.2 points, 10.8 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 0.9 steals, and 1.8 blocks in 29 games with the Mavericks since joining the team in February 2025. He averaged 25.7 points, 11.9 rebounds, 3.4 assists, 1.3 steals, and 2.1 blocks in his final two seasons with the Lakers. He could win Defensive Player of the Year if Victor Wembanyama fails to meet the 65-game eligibility threshold, removing the frontrunner from contention
Davis’ podcast comments show he doesn’t have high hopes for what the team will achieve next season, but they’ve definitely put the pieces of a winning franchise together. The Young-Davis duo needs to help them return to the postseason, with the young core of players such as Bilal Coulibaly, Kyshawn George, Alex Sarr, Tre Johnson, and more, all fitting in nicely around this duo.
We have seen incredible single-season win-loss turnarounds, with the Detroit Pistons most recently going from 14-68 in 2023-24 to a 44-38 record in 2024-25, with them going 60-22 for the No. 1 seed this season.
The most famous positive example of this is the 2008 Boston Celtics, who won a championship after going 66-16 in the regular season, one season after going 24-58.
The Pistons were a young team that suddenly leveled up, while the Celtics added two star players to push their already competitive but unspectacular core around Paul Pierce forward. One could argue the Wizards are a mix of both situations, with a crop of talented youngsters ready to take a leap, while they also added two high-level NBA All-Stars who can push them forward.
