Bradley Beal just got a $251 million participation trophy

On Jul 1, 2022

We should all be so lucky one day to afford living in the wondrous land of make-believe. After signing the richest contract in Washington Wizards history, Bradley Beal has all the money necessary to build an estate — maybe four — in that dreamy paradise.

Beal thinks he can win in Washington. And he believes he can construct a championship team here, one that will presumably reside next door to his mansions built on pipe dreams and puppy dog kisses. If we’re to trust his own words, which he has repeated time and time again, that is the only reason Beal decided to sign away his prime to the Wizards for a maximum $251 million over five years.

“The money is awesome. Granted, when we grew up playing, we played the game to make a lot of money. We played the game to take care of our family,” Beal told fellow NBA player Draymond Green recently. “But that also comes with, when you make that money, you want to win ballgames. You want to be able to play for something, right? I want to play in meaningful games, right? I want to be playing in late June. That’s what I want.”

Bradley Beal signs five-year max contract with Wizards

There you have it: Preorder your 2023 Wizards Eastern Conference finals hat, T-shirt and commemorative section of The Washington Post. While the rest of us broke peons remain sadly tethered to reality, and therefore see the Wizards for what they are — a franchise so average, its losses become legendary — Beal envisions greatness.

With all the delusion $251 million can buy, Beal has convinced himself that his best chance at winning will come from remaining here. In D.C. Where he has never played beyond the conference semifinals. Where he had to average 31.3 points a night for the indignity of losing in five games in the opening round of the 2021 playoffs. And where franchise decision-makers rushed to mire themselves in another long-term, bloated contract. They should have remembered: Those don’t work out so well around here.

In 2008, the Wizards gave Gilbert Arenas $111 million over six years, and words like “disaster” … “cluster bomb” … and “why God, why?!” are the nicest things that come to mind about that deal. Arenas appeared in just 55 more games for Washington, and his gunplay episode with Javaris Crittenton led to Washington circling the drain for the next several years.

In 2017, after John Wall made the all-NBA team, the team rewarded him with a $170 million extension. He hasn’t completed a full season since. Feeling generous, Wizards majority owner Ted Leonsis handed out another max deal that summer, this time to Otto Porter Jr. The next year he averaged 14.7 points, which was a career high at the time, but he also became the best trade asset in Washington’s emergency salary dump following Wall’s franchise-altering injury.

An NBA contract should honor prior service and, judging by the individual work performed by Arenas, then Wall, Porter and now Beal — who has pocketed multiple max contracts over his 10 years with the team that drafted him — they all deserved their bag. However, none of these anointed franchise stars has ushered the Wizards off the treadmill of late-lottery pick purgatory and into so much as a conference finals. The team stands alone in the NBA with the longest active drought since making that round.

But, $251 million whispers to Beal that’s about to change. Even though evidence from the recent past screams otherwise.

The Beal era in D.C. dawned when Wall’s eroded. For years, the young duo formed a dynamic backcourt that teased with great possibilities. They thought they could have been contenders, but broken bones, second-round exits and an oh-so-close Game 7 loss snapped them back to reality.

Their dynamic changed suddenly in late December, 2018, when Wall departed for a surgeon’s table to fix a lingering bone spur issue. Because fate doesn’t want the Wizards to have nice things, in early 2019 he compounded that injury by slipping in his home bathroom and rupturing his left Achilles’. The injury and rehab guaranteed that he would miss the entire 2019-20 year. Then before the start of the shortened 2020-21 season, the Wizards dealt Wall to Houston for the right to have Russell Westbrook chase stats in a Washington jersey for one season.

All the while, Beal ascended as the new and undisputed face of the franchise. He has been an all-star, an all-NBA player and even a top-two scorer in the league. Everything but a winner.

Thanks to my colleague Neil Greenberg, we can see just how uninspiring these years have been. With Beal as the face of Monumental Basketball, the team has a 43.4 winning percentage in games he has appeared in — which would give Washington the eighth-worst percentage in the league over that stretch. In the 203 games Beal has played — he missed more than half of last season with a wrist injury — the Wizards were outscored by an average of 2.2 points per…