Wizards Pushing Limits of Youth With 11 Players on Rookie Deals

On Tuesday, the Wizards traded veteran center Kelly Olynyk to the Spurs days after acquiring him, with San Antonio sending back Malaki Branham, Blake Wesley, and a 2026 second-round pick. 

It might seem like a minor deal—Olynyk averaged ten points last year, while Branham and Wesley were bench players for the Spurs—but it gave Washington a whopping 11 players on rookie-scale contracts.

Three other roster slots currently belong to veterans CJ McCollum, Khris Middleton and Marcus Smart, all of whom are on expiring deals. That all combines to give the Wizards roughly $100 million in cap space next summer. The unique roster construction allows the Wizards to be a destination for teams to send them assets in exchange for absorbing bad contracts into their salary space; it also gives them multiple years of financial flexibility as the team evaluates its young core.

Perhaps most importantly, it helps the Wizards in the short term. 

The team’s 2026 first-round pick would go to the Knicks if it falls outside of the top eight; given this summer’s roster moves, that appears increasingly unlikely.

The Wizards’ youth movement was in full swing last season with an uncompetitive roster; it got even younger this summer. The team shipped out 26-year-olds Jordan Poole and Saddiq Bey; that deal brought back McCollum on an expiring deal and Olynyk, whom the team flipped into the two 22-year-olds from the Spurs. The Wizards also have five players drafted last year on rookie-scale deals, two players they drafted this summer, and Bilal Coulibaly from 2023. They acquired 2023 first-round pick Cam Whitmore from the Rockets for two second-round picks last week.

The Olynyk trade is not official yet, meaning the teams involved can’t comment on it. The Wizards did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their strategy generally.

Wizards GM Will Dawkins comes from the Thunder, which just completed a five-year journey from tanking to a title. Dawkins—who worked for the organization for 15 years and was the Thunder’s vice president of basketball operations from 2020 to 2023—saw his boss Sam Presti shut players down before the end of the season to improve the team’s draft odds. But Presti never carried quite so many young players on his roster.

In fact, the Thunder were acutely aware that you can only develop so many young players at a time; the team traded former top-20 picks such as Aleksej Pokuševski and Tre Mann over the years. Even the ‘Process’ Sixers never had 11 rookie-scale players at once. 

Wizards owner Ted Leonsis previously told Front Office Sports that the organization didn’t spend the past season tanking despite finishing with an 18–64 record, second-worst in the NBA. The Wizards were tied for the highest-lottery odds for a top-three pick, but fell to sixth, where they selected Texas guard Tre Johnson. 

“We weren’t tanking,” Leonsis said to FOS. “We were developing players. It’s a little different than maybe what some of the other teams’ strategy was.”

As the Wizards enter another season of their rebuild, perhaps the same sentiment still applies.