“I think this is instantaneously one of the worst contracts in the league.”
I cannot believe we are still watching this franchise do this.
Brian Windhorst said that on NBA Today, the same day the deal broke. He wasn’t hedging, wasn’t softening, wasn’t waiting to see how Trae Young looks in training camp. He raised a glass (his words) to Trae and his agent for extracting $212 million from an organization that has been bad at basketball for longer than most of its fans have been alive, and then immediately told you this was going to end badly. That is a hell of a thing to say in real time, and the even more hellish thing is that he’s completely right.
https://x.com/ShamsCharania/status/2069129593672310898
Here’s what the Washington Wizards just agreed to: $49.5 million in Year 1, $51.9 million in Year 2, $54.4 million in Year 3, and $56.9 million in Year 4 with a player option, meaning Trae holds the exit ramp and Washington holds the bill. He declined his existing $49 million option to sign this deal. His agent did their job beautifully. The Wizards front office apparently forgot theirs.
The argument for the contract is real, so let’s give it its due. Trae Young is 27 years old and a four-time All-Star. He’s averaged 25.1 points and 9.8 assists per game for his career. He didn’t have a gigantic market — Windhorst himself noted it wasn’t “an intellectually sane argument that enough teams showed interest to justify this figure.” When Washington traded for him in January 2026, he played well in those games while healthy. He’s electric. The highlight reel is genuine. If you squint and hold your breath and believe that Atlanta was the problem, that a new city and a new front office and a young core around him will unlock something different, you can construct a case.
You just can’t construct a case that survives contact with forty years of evidence.
The Washington Wizards have a 40.2% win percentage since 1973. That’s second-worst in the NBA, only above the Sacramento Kings. They’ve been above .500 six times in the last twenty years. Six. This organization has had Gilbert Arenas — three All-Star selections. It had John Wall, Bradley Beal. It briefly had Michael Jordan. They have had genuine talent arrive and leave, and the result has always been the same. Their draft history includes Kwame Brown at No. 1 overall in 2001, Jan Vesely, and Johnny Davis. The issue has never been a shortage of names. The issue is that Washington has never built an organization capable of surrounding those names with anything that lasts.
This is what Windhorst is really calling out when he says he can’t see a trade market for this contract without attaching the No. 1 pick. It’s not just that $212 million for Trae Young is a lot of money. It’s that Washington has no structural mechanism for making this work. They can’t build the right team around him because they don’t have a front office that has ever demonstrated the ability to build the right team around anyone. Michael Winger and Will Dawkins are new, and maybe they’re different, but the bet you’re making with this contract is that the organizational competence problem that has defined this franchise for four decades has been solved by people who have been on the job for about five minutes.
Then there’s the basketball reality, which is brutal in its own right. Trae Young is an elite scorer and passer who has made one Eastern Conference Finals in seven-plus seasons with Atlanta. One ECF run. That 2021 run ended when Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks beat them in six and went on to win the championship. The following year, Young came back and lost in the first round to the Miami Heat, and that was basically it. He’s historically fragile when the game gets physical, and the East he is walking into now has Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Oklahoma City Thunder at the top, Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs ascending, and a Heat team now built around Giannis. The margins are going to be extremely thin for a point guard who has never proven he wants to guard anyone.
The person getting buried by this decision is not Trae Young. He got paid enormously, correctly from his perspective, and good for him. The people getting buried are Washington basketball fans, who have sat through four decades of organizational failure, watched ownership convince itself yet again that a marquee signing can substitute for institutional competence, and are now locked into this particular bet for the next four years. This is a franchise that couldn’t develop Alex Sarr and Kyshawn George and Tre Johnson and a No. 1 overall pick in a clean, patient rebuild without blinking and dropping $212 million on a player who got traded out of his previous city. That tells you everything about what this organization believes about itself. It believes the answer is always out there in free agency. It is never out there in free agency.
Windhorst said he couldn’t trade this contract without attaching the No. 1 pick to it. He’s right. Which means for the Wizards to get out, they’d have to blow up everything they have: the young core, the top pick, the theoretical future. All of it, to undo a decision they made in June 2026. That’s not a worst-case scenario. That’s what they’re going to talk themselves into in about three years while Trae scores 27 in a loss to the Thunder. Check back on our NBA coverage when that happens. It’ll feel familiar.
This isn’t a Trae Young problem. It never was. Washington has a governance problem that predates him by decades, and they just signed a contract that proves it’s still very much alive.
