Wizards season ticket holders may have to wait until 2027 to see their new prized acquisition.
Guard Trae Young may not play for Washington this season after his stunning trade from the Hawks, according to The Athletic.
Young, 27, only played in 10 games this season for Atlanta due to injury before being shipped to lowly Washington for a pair of players.
One league executive speculated that Washington is going to be uber-conservative with Young’s rehab to ensure it does not lose its top-eight protected 2026 first-round pick to the Knicks.
Should the Wizards finish with a bottom-eight record this season, it instead will owe the Knicks a pair of second-round picks.
“This is what life is like under our [draft] lottery system, with partially protected draft picks,” one NBA executive told ESPN. “You have one team (the Hawks) that doesn’t have its pick trading a player because they were losing too much when he was playing.
“And you have another team (the Wizards) who desperately needs to keep its pick who may find a reason not to play the same player because they might win too much if he plays.”
Young has been sidelined with a quad injury, which is usually not a season-ending ailment.
The Wizards, though, have little motivation to rush him back.
This trade was made with the future in mind, not the 2026 campaign.
The Wizards (10-26) have the NBA’s fourth-worst record and are only three games above the league’s bottom-dwellers in the Pacers.
They are four games worse than the Mavericks, whose 14-24 represents the ninth-worst mark in the league.
The prudent play for Washington is to get that top-eight pick, hope it gets some lottery luck, and then build a better roster for the 2027 season — even if the Knicks may disagree.
Beyond Young being sidelined, the Wizards sent away CJ McCollum and his team-high 18.8 points per game and Corey Kispert’s 9.2 points per game.
Losing 28 points per game while replacing that production with bench-warmers from one of the league’s worst lineups is not a strategy that screams winning basketball.
