The Washington Wizards haven’t made the NBA Playoffs in five seasons, but that somehow isn’t the streak that best epitomizes how poorly the team has been run over the last decade-plus.
The Thunder winning the NBA Championship ends the saddest Wizards streak
The Wizards didn’t win a title on Sunday night, but they did at least not help another team do so for the first time in nearly a decade.
Photo by G Fiume/Getty Images
Harrison Faigen has been covering the NBA (primarily the Lakers) since 2013, and is currently the Associate Director of Pro Basketball coverage for SB Nation.
That (dis)honor goes to the reality that heading into tonight, the last eight NBA champions had a former Wizard on their team, meaning that the Wizards have been more successful at developing talent for eventual title winners (eight times) than making the playoffs themselves in the worst conference (just three times in the last 10 seasons).
But with no former Wizards on the Thunder roster, that weird statistical quirk came to an end when Thomas Bryant and Quinton Jackson’s Indiana Pacers couldn’t pull of a Game 7 miracle to capture the 2025 NBA Finals on Sunday night. We’ll never know what would have happened if Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton hadn’t sustained a devastating injury in the opening minutes, but the Wizards avoided having that ignominious factoid extended nonetheless.
Now, is this an extremely random stat? Of course. But it is also indicative of how poorly run the Wizards have been — and how much roster turnover there has been in the nation’s capital — that so many of their former players were able to leave and contribute to winning at the highest level elsewhere while their own team was mostly hopeless in the NBA’s JV conference.
And while Wizards fans likely weren’t waiting with baited breath, hoping and praying for the Thunder to put an end to their sad streak, the even better news for Washington is that if the 2025 Finals proved anything, it’s that under the league’s current collective bargaining agreement, any team can compete for titles if they are run well, no matter their market size.
But even in this parity era, the Wizards will likely continue to be rebuilding for at least a few more years before they can reach the level of these Pacers and Thunder, if they ever can. However, this streak coming to an end means that they’ve at least stopped hemorrhaging talent out the door quite so frequently, and might be in the early stages of finding players that can help them win, instead of spreading out across the league to help others do so.
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