LetMeSeeYourWarFace21

Have we had any summer league games yet?

Who is the last GOOD free agent to sign with the Wiz/Bullets? and I don't mean sign an extension.

Gilbert Arenas?

I'll just be glad when we get to the point where we are good enough that a big time free agent would consider coming here. We are NEVER in talks with any of the prime time free agents.  Would be great if Wall, Beal, and Porter pan out to be our big 3. But once they do, we need to add one more SIGNIFICANT player.

Somehow, some way, Ernie Grunfeld has blundered our way into an incredible position. There is so much we did wrong:

- Gilbert Arenas extension.

- Mike Miller & Randy Foye

- We whiffed on the entire 2011 class.

- We royally screwed up extending Blatche and had to use our amnesty on him. Still paying him for a while too.

- We ended up with a situation where we had to play JaVale McGee and Nick Young big minutes, making us effectively the dumbest team in the NBA. The Shaqtin' A Fool Dynasty.

- There was a point when Jordan Big Balls Crawford, who once claimed he could be at least as good as MJ, was our team MVP and only credible scorer. In the midst of a 4-28 stretch.

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And then there is so much that just kind of fell into place for us:

- We got our young superstar by getting majorly lucky in the lottery. In a year where there was a transcendent talent at PG.

- We got the platonic ideal of runningmates for him in Beal and Porter soon after. You literally could not have drafted a SG and SF better suited to playing with Wall.

And there isn't a chance in hell that could have happened without lottery luck. One pick later in 2012 and Beal would be a Cleveland Cavalier and we'd have been screwed. This year, if we'd been stuck at 8, we would have missed out on Bennett, Porter, Noel, Len, Zeller, Dipo, and McLemore! That was every non PG in the top tier! We'd have been totally screwed and would have had to take CJ McCollum or something--not a bad player, but a career reserve for us. The basketball gods smiled on us lottery night in three out of four consecutive years. The improbability of that blows my mind. We're the Wizards!

- We traded Gil and his impossible contract and somehow ended up with a decent starting C and a pretty good rotational SF with deals that expire at just the right time. We lucked into a situation where a GM in the division was desperately trying to make it work with Dwight and he had a suitable contract to make a one for one trade. Fastforward to today, Gil is off doing God knows what, out of the league and just got arrested. Our young franchise PG is emerging as a star. And the GM that traded for Gil has long since been fired and his team has been burnt to the ground and is in the middle of a total rebuild. We dodged a nuclear bomb. Again, we're the Wizards. That just doesn't happen to us.

- We took advantage of Denver's unusual buyer's remorse to upgrade from JaVale Pierre McGee to Nene. That Nene was available in and of itself was such an unlikely turn of events. He had a career year where he lead the NBA in FG%, got hurt in the offseason, and came into the year slowed. Which scared Denver just months after they signed him to a big long term extension. It was a bizarre sequence of events and it bailed us out of a bad situation at C. And before anyone starts whining about Nene's contract because of his injuries, consider the alternatives. We could be paying JaVale McGee 11 million a year for the next three years instead. Or worse, we could have no credible 7 footer at all and be forced to lean on Kevin Seraphin.

- We lucked into Martell, who signed for peanuts because Minny gave up on him because of health issues. He ends up being a big locker room guy and has a career year. When has a frequently injured free agent coming off a disappointing stint for two other teams ever blossomed as a Wizard?

- And then we made what, at the time, seemed a terrible trade for Okafor and Ariza. Only both improbably got better once they got here, which might be the first time in Wizards history that has ever happened. We actually bought low from another team.

The expirings are useful players in the meantime, guys you wouldn't mind seeing stick around at a reduced cost. And it postponed our massive amount of scheduled savings in expiring deals by one year to just the right summer. It's a good RFA market. And the confluence of a deep, potentially star studded UFA class, a very nice RFA class, a once in a decade draft class, and brand new, harsh luxury taxes have created a tremendous buyer's market for teams looking for vet players.

And at the same time, the Eastern Conference is in the midst of realigning itself:

- Boston just went into full on tank mode. Scratch them from the playoffs for a while.

- Orlando went into tank mode last season and should be there for a while.

- Philly went into tank mode and should be there for a while too.

- Atlanta went into tank mode, scratch them from the palyoffs too.

- Toronto is in the midst of an overhaul and has a mess of a roster.

- Detroit and Milwaukee are stuck in purgatory, without stars or any way to get one, on the fringes of the playoff picture for the forseeable future.

- Charlotte is Charlotte (although I think they get better eventually).

- Chicago and Indiana have probably reached their ceilings. They've got good but flawed teams that have scoring issues and no realistic way to fix those issues definitively. Chicago is over the tax and has two pretty bad contracts in Deng and Boozer. Indiana is going to lose whatever flexibility they gain from letting Granger walk when they immediately have to go and max out Paul George.

- The Knicks have a fundamentally flawed roster and zero flexibility.

- The Nets are a mess of an organization with no flexibility any more, a bizarre coaching hire, an aging roster with a tiny window to be a pretend contender.

- Miami is still Miami, and this is still their conference. But that big 3 construction has an expiration date on it, and you started to see cracks in the foundation this postseason. They might have to retool around LeBron as early as next summer.

There is going to be room for the Wizards to jump up into the upper echelon of the East.

Still have to see how Philly and Boston and Orlando and Charlotte come out of the 2014 draft. But as of today, the only Eastern teams that scare me long term are Miami, Chicago, and Cleveland. Each have legit superstars leading them, and though Brooklyn and New York do too, those rosters are a mess.

But I think we can be better than Chicago and Cleveland having the same superstar PG construction. I think that, though DRose is better than Wall, Beal and Porter will be better than Chicago's #2 and #3. And I think Wall is better than Kyrie, Beal is better than Waiters, and Porter will be at least as good as Bennett, if not better.

We just need to find a long term option at PF or C.

GREAT POST..........