I've gone on record and said that I believe Ernie Grunfeld is an average GM. I'm ok with that. I understand that the Wizards are in year 3 of the rebuild, and after starting from scratch they are not in the upper half of teams in the league. I'm ok with that too. This is the most difficult league to win in, and it usually takes a lot of luck thats out of the control of the organization. Most teams in the league have NEVER won a title, and almost every rebuild ends in failure. Again I'm ok with that. This has been the only NBA team I've ever rooted for, and I'm enjoying the journey.

I can accept disappointing results, if the process makes sense. Thats the part of this rebuild that I'm not ok with, so far there is a huge flaw in the process thats not making any sense. To me the key to any rebuild is your draft picks. I totally understand the logic that says you want to accumulate as many high draft picks in a cluster as possible to see what you can unearth. Thats step one. The wizards did this, and came away with 7 different top 20 picks in 3 years. To Ernie's credit, not one of them is an outright bust. Thats impressive regardless of what you think of the man. The next logical step is evaluation of the talent and formulating a plan to actually rebuild into a winner. In our case this is fairly simple (and I assumed had been done after the trade deadline last season). You don't get to pick the talent that your kids have, you just have to work with what they bring to the table. With Wall as the best of the bunch the future is a defense first team, that gets tons of fast break points, and lives off the drive and kick in the half court. The basketball gods even blessed us with Seraphin, a gifted low post scorer whose skills adds a nice little wrinkle to what we can feature moving forward.

After thats done, the next and final step is to shape your roster around your new identity and bring in complementary players. Everyone in the organization should understand your identity and you spend the remaining games perfecting that identity until you start winning consistently on that identity. This is where we have failed. Its year 3 of the rebuild and I'm still not sure of our identity. Through the first 4 games the team has attempted 25 3pt per game. If the plan is to be a defense first team, that gets its points in transition and takes a lot of threes, then why in the world would you not get shooters? Furthermore, there hasn't been a great team in the history of the league with an 11 man rotation. If we know what we want to be, doesn't it make sense to start packaging some of the young kids and consolidate the roster to what it needs to look like to succeed with our identity? As it stands this is a failure of management. What exactly is our identity? If you have an identity defined why are we not moving towards this identity with our roster decisions? Also does the coach know what we're trying to do, because the gameplan seems to change on a game to game basis (except for Price and Pargo launching and missing 3's). This is unacceptable to me. My patience is willing to go until the trade deadline, but I need to see the process start to make sense.