Was trading Deni Avdija a mistake for the Washington Wizards?

The Washington Wizards did not need another reminder of the most controversial trade of the Michael Winger-Will Dawkins era, but that reminder arrived a week ago, anyway.

The 2025-26 All-NBA Team, announced last Sunday, nearly included forward Deni Avdija following his breakout season for the Portland Trail Blazers. Avdija received the 16th-highest point total in the voter balloting, trailing Oklahoma City Thunder center/forward Chet Holmgren for the final spot on the All-NBA Third Team.

On draft night two years ago, the Wizards agreed to trade Avdija to the Trail Blazers for a 2024 first-round pick (which was used to select Bub Carrington), a 2029 first-round pick, second-round picks in 2028 and 2030 and veteran guard Malcolm Brogdon.

A deal that seemed reasonable at the time, primarily because of the two incoming first-round picks, now looks like a significant loss for the Wizards — but only if it is evaluated solely on the players’ on-court performance during the last two seasons.

Avdija’s potential as a versatile defender was evident during his four seasons in Washington, but he often suffered from a lack of confidence, shot erratically from long range and was confined within a narrowly defined role.

In Portland, however, he has seized a larger opportunity and honed the skills he flashed with the Wizards: ballhandling, court vision and a knack for drawing shooting fouls. He earned his first career All-Star nod this season and led Portland to a first-round playoff appearance as he averaged 24.2 points, 6.9 rebounds and 6.7 assists per game.

Comparing Avdija at this stage of his career to Carrington at this stage of his career is an unfair comparison. Carrington is much earlier in his development arc than Avdija is.

Carrington’s positives include his durability and his shooting. He has played in all 164 of the Wizards’ regular-season games during his two seasons, and this season, he supplemented his strong midrange shooting by making 40.8 percent of his 3-point tries. He still has a long way to go in other areas, however, especially defense and finishing at the rim. So far, he appears more comfortable on offense playing off the ball than as a point guard. Still, he won’t turn 21 years old until July, and it would be much too early to write him off.

Brogdon spent one season with the Wizards, appearing in only 24 games, but was said to have had a positive influence on the team’s young roster because of his professionalism.

What makes this trade worrisome from the Wizards’ perspective is that it appears, at first glance, that the front office and coaching staff might have underestimated Avdija’s potential and gave up on him too soon. Picked ninth in 2020, Avdija was drafted when Tommy Sheppard was the Wizards’ general manager.

Winger and Dawkins arrived in 2023, and one of the underlying principles of their plan was, and remains, to correctly evaluate their own players and make those evaluations before their players lost their trade value.

Knowing what we know now, it appears the Wizards undersold on Avdija, who was only 23 years old at the time of the trade.

Avdija, who turned 25 early this year, is the kind of player the Wizards should covet: a plus player on both ends of the floor. Given more playmaking freedom by the Trail Blazers, Avdija has flourished in a way he rarely did during his four seasons on the Wizards’ roster.

Washington has some promising youngsters in the fold — Alex Sarr, Kyshawn George, Tre Johnson, Bilal Coulibaly, Will Riley and Carrington — and it’s too early to know what their ceilings will be. But will any of them emerge as All-Stars in the future?

That’s a fair question.

In January, I asked Winger whether the Avdija trade was a mistake.

“No, it was not a mistake,” Winger said. “I’m very, very happy for Deni. We’re all very happy Deni. We saw Deni as a very high-level ascending player. (We’re) super-happy for him, super-happy for the Blazers. We’ve got a lot of friends there with the Blazers.

“But, no, because we did it for the reasons we said then, which is to, in effect, take us back a couple years so that we could reset the roster, and everybody was sort of on the same age curve. And Deni’s ahead of that.”

There’s an element to all of this that hasn’t yet been fully appreciated, something that the front office has not discussed: Trading Avdija helped position the Wizards to win early picks in the 2025 and 2026 drafts.

Because of his two-way impact, Avdija would have made it more difficult for Washington to tank the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons.

The Wizards finished the 2024-25 season with the league’s second-worst record, 18-64, but fell in the 2025 lottery to sixth in the draft order. Washington wound up picking Johnson at No. 6.

The Wizards finished this season with the league’s worst record outright, 17-65, with losses in 26 of their final 27 games, and won the lottery.

Assuming it doesn’t trade the No. 1 pick, Washington will select from a group of four potential franchise-changing prospects: BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, Duke’s Cameron Boozer and North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson.

What happened in the lottery was luck. Washington entered the drawing with only a 14.0 percent chance of winning.

In an apparent contradiction, positioning the team to finish with the league’s worst record — and with it, the best possible chance of winning the lottery — required a certain skill.

CJ McCollum, who was playing to earn his next free-agent contract, was enjoying a renaissance season, leading the Wizards to a 10-25 record through Jan. 6, including victories over the playoff-bound Atlanta Hawks (in which he scored 46 points) and the playoff-bound Orlando Magic (in which he scored 27 points).

On Jan. 7, when the Wizards agreed to trade McCollum and Corey Kispert for Young, there were no guarantees that the Wizards would finish the season with the league’s worst record. At the end of that day, the Indiana Pacers had only six wins, and the Sacramento Kings and New Orleans Pelicans had only eight wins apiece.

The race to the bottom of the 2025-26 league standings was cutthroat.

If Avdija still had been on Washington’s roster during the 2025-26 season, it’s inconceivable to think that Washington would have finished with the league’s worst record if he had remained healthy. Even without Avdija and McCollum, the Wizards still needed to move heaven and earth to finish the season at 17-65. It required devoting heavy minutes late in the season to the likes of Leaky Black, Sharife Cooper and Juju Reese and not playing the team’s best young players.

It took the league’s worst record to win this year’s lottery.

Now, Washington has the chance to draft a foundational player.

So, no, trading Avdija was not a mistake. Trading Avdija helped to create that opportunity.

And now, the Wizards have to make the most of it.