Could a team of Wizards & Bullets legends beat the 2016-17 Warriors?

Earlier this month, Sean Corp wrote an interesting piece for Detroit Bad Boys about how to construct a Pistons super team featuring the best players from all eras to take down the Warriors, one of the best single-season teams in NBA history.

Naturally, it got me thinking about the Wizards and how the answer to this question is a more complicated for Washington than Detroit. The Pistons have two different title eras to pull from and also have peak Grant Hill at their disposal. Meanwhile, this franchise only has one title team and they played in an era where the game was so much different than it is now.

I got to talking with Ben Standig of Locked on Wizards about the idea and we decided to do a podcast where we fleshed the idea out. We set up the following ground rules to shape the discussion:

• The goal is to create a team to BEAT THE WARRIORS IN A SEVEN GAME SERIES, not just put together the most accomplished players in team history. Note the difference.
• The game has to be played on modern terms. We’re not trying to figure out if the Warriors could be a good team in the 1970’s.
• Wizards players need be to selected based on their performance as Wizards. If you take Michael Jordan, you get the angry, 40-year-old who missed dunks, not the one who dominated the 90’s.
• You can pick a player from any era of the franchise. If you wanna go all the way back to the Chicago Zephyrs, go nuts.

With that in mind, we tried to construct a 10-man roster that would have a shot at taking down the Warriors on the podcast.

Without getting into all the specifics (that’s what the podcast is for, silly) we came up with the following starting lineup:

• John Wall
• Gilbert Arenas
• Caron Butler
• Elvin Hayes
• Chris Webber

We also both agreed on four players for the bench:

• Earl Monroe
• Bradley Beal
• Wes Unseld
• Ben Wallace

Ben and I varied on the final spot. I went with Jeff Malone, he opted for Bobby Dandridge.

Certainly, there are some other players from team history you could plug in who would be useful as well. Trevor Ariza’s perimeter defense would be nice to have, Otto Porter’s positional versatility would be useful, and Moses Malone could punish anyone on the low block.

Still, the question remains: Could a super team like this take down the Warriors? To be honest, I’m not quite sure. The Wizards/Bullets would certainly have some advantages with depth and their bigs. But on the other end, the Warriors would have the two best players on the floor, an advantage on the perimeter, and as we saw in the Finals, they can negate their depth issues by playing their stars more minutes.

Either way, it’s reassuring to know John Wall would get a lot of assists: