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Bradley Beal, for better or worse

The star Wizard has a no-trade clause, giving him control over the situation should the team ever want to move on.

Jul 7

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Youth With a Jug, Judith Leyster, 1633

Perhaps the strangest career arc for any player under 30 with at least one All-NBA honor under his belt who is not named Ben Simmons just took another strange turn. Bradley Beal signed a 5-year max deal with the Wizards, according to reports, and gained a true no-trade clause in the process. Beal becomes the only player in the entire NBA with an active no-trade clause.

No-trade clauses have become rare as players switch teams with more frequency. Rules state you need to be in the league for eight seasons and with the same team for four consecutive years to be given a no-trade by that team in a new deal. For teams, they are seen as onerous limits of roster-building freedom, giving star players veto power over their destination if things turned sideways.

Beal has been mentioned as a flight risk from Washington for years now, even as the Wizards have struggled to remain competitively relevant. That Beal hadn’t previously demanded a trade or fled in free agency is a win for Washington and a surprise for everyone else; he’s probably the best player the Wizards have had since the late 1970s. The late 1970s. Yeah.

He’s also been named to All-NBA just once and to the All-Star Game — where the top 24 players in the league appear, give or take — just three times. If you’re ranking NBA players, it feels like he should be in the top 15-20 range. Except in practice, he’s missed that top-24 cut-off in two of the past four seasons and has only hit the official (for whatever it’s worth) top-15 mark via All-NBA once in 10 seasons.

The Beal-era Wizards were so promising early on. In Beal’s second season, the Wizards made the second round. They did it again the following season (and, many including myself are convinced, would have made the conference finals if not for an ill-timed John Wall injury). They missed the playoffs at .500 in the following season, switched coaches, and made it back to the second round, losing to the Celtics in seven in 2017. And then they got the No. 8 in 2018 and lost in the first round.

They haven’t finished .500 in the four seasons since. They got into the playoffs on a late Russell Westbrook fueled sprint to the play-in in 2021, Beal’s only All-NBA nod. Those vibes were short-lived as Westbrook angled for a trade to the Lakers in the offseason … and reportedly tried to cajole Beal into joining him. Beal stayed, a win for Washington. But actual on-court wins for Washington were harder to come by, even with a seemingly improved roster and a well-respected rookie head coach in Wes Unseld Jr.

Part of the Wizards’ issue is that Beal has missed a lot of games in recent years, playing in just 70% of Washington’s regular season contests over the past three years. The Wizards don’t have another star to fall back on. There’s not really much more offense there without Beal’s scoring prowess.

That said, offense hasn’t been the Wizards’ biggest problem of late. Here’s Washington’s league ranking in defensive rating for each of the past four below-.500 seasons: #27, #29, #20, #25. The offense has bounced between average and good as Beal has hovered around the 30-ppg mark with, for the most part, good efficiency. But there’s just no defensive consistency with the roster, including with Beal. That was part of the rationale for Unseld Jr. That’s why everyone was so excited for Deni Avdija taking on big defensive assignments early last season, when the Wizards briefly looked great.

So where does all this leave us? The Wizards are blessed to have Bradley Beal, truly. He’s a really good player, and you need really good players to win games, make the playoffs and win series. And to be clear, by all accounts, that would be enough for the Wizards right now. The Wizards fans in my life, I’m sure, would be t-h-r-i-l-l-e-d to lose in the second round again, like in the good ol’ Beal-Wall days.

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Since Wall’s devastating leg injuries, the Wizards just have not been able to put a roster capable of hitting that level around Beal, and Beal has been unable to get to a level to overcome that. (Hitting that level may simply not be possible; the talent level at guard in the NBA right now is absolutely unbelievable.)

In the lifecycle of NBA rosters, at some point a front office with a star and a failed team decides to move on from the star. The Wizards have, to their credit, stubbornly refused to do that. But this is the curse of Beal’s new deal: that option is not quite off the table, but Beal himself has outsized control over the nuclear option. Beal will have veto power over whether the Wizards can take the best deal for the franchise; if it ever comes to moving on, the front office will have to take the best deal that Beal approves. That could limit the type of package the Wizards pull off. If Beal’s approving a trade with an eye on deep playoff runs, isn’t he going to want his new squad to be as loaded as possible? In a trade situation the interest for Beal are the opposite of the Wizards’ interests. That sounds like heartburn.

That’s a potential problem in the future. This may very well have been the cost of doing business with Beal now — “no-trade or I walk” — and again, the Wizards are blessed to have Beal as they try again to build a roster that can win enough games to excite the fanbase and keep the team playing into May. But if that doesn’t materialize, that no-trade clause is a ticking time bomb that simply could mean that Beal is staying the Wizards forever, no matter the team’s success or failure, for better or worse.

Scores

Sky 78, Lynx 81 — HERE COME THE LYNX. Beat the Aces and Sky back to back, Aerial Powers is cooking, 2.5 games out of the No. 8 seed.

Mystics 85, Dream 66 — Elena Delle Donne with 26 on 10/17 shooting against one of the better defenses in the league. The Mystics are now 11-4 when EDD plays and 3-6 without her. Big Candace Parker/Sky 2021 vibes, and we know how that ended …

Liberty 116, Aces 107 — No defense required; this is a regulation score. Sabrina Ionescu had the first 30-point triple-double in WNBA history.

10/13 from the floor, 7/8 from deep, zero turnovers, all against a damn good backcourt. She’s looking like the player everyone thought she’d be coming out of Oregon.

A’ja Wilson, meanwhile, is still looking like the MVP favorite (29-9-4). Han Xu went for 24 in 20 minutes off the bench for New York, 11/12 from the field. The Aces had a chance to retake the No. 1 seed; alas.