- 12 hours ago
Grant & Danny are live from the Wizards Draft Party and they are ready for the Wizards to have an opportunity to change everything.
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00:00Today is such an exciting day though. Yep. The NBA draft. I've got some juice flowing here.
00:07I am excited. I've got some nerves, a little anxiety going, but mostly I'm just super excited.
00:14This is one of those get-to days in this job. Not a half-to day, a get-to day.
00:19We are sitting as they set up the anthem for a draft party. It looks already awesome and amazing.
00:25There are gigantic screens in front of us where people will be watching the NBA draft.
00:29You can tell with all the balloons and the different decorations and things they're hanging and setting up.
00:35This is going to be such a first-class cool event.
00:38And we are front and center here. We'll be here all night long.
00:41The Junkies are coming out. You and I will be hosting a show with them.
00:44Strobes and Tobes deep into the evening with our nighttime show.
00:48Linnell Willingham's involved, but it's going to be a blast.
00:50And this is one of those days, if you're a D.C. sports fan, that is kind of generational.
00:55This is a once-every-10-to-15-years kind of night where your beloved team gets the number one
01:01pick
01:01and gets to take one of the great players in America to join our organization.
01:05Of course, nothing is guaranteed.
01:08The Wizards have picked first before.
01:10Of course, there's no, because you have this player, the countdown starts T-minus three years
01:15until you're in the finals or whatever.
01:17You never know.
01:18But I will say this.
01:20Every once in a while, I think of people like myself who are lifelong Washington Wizards fans.
01:28You don't get much, quite frankly.
01:30You don't really feel a lot of times like it's worth it.
01:34You haven't had a whole bunch of moments to fall back on and real profound joy from following this team.
01:42Even the stuff that was great are still fairly small potatoes when it comes to it, right?
01:46I mean, you think of Gilbert Arenas' shot against Chicago after Janelle Pargo went nuts
01:50to win a first-round series before they got summarily swatted away.
01:54You think of some cool moments where the John Wall-led Wizards got out of the first round only to
01:58be dismissed.
01:59No conference final appearances in my lifetime.
02:02There aren't that many moments of celebration in Wizards history.
02:06This is one.
02:07And again, as I said, it doesn't guarantee anything.
02:09And you guys can be cynical and you can scoff and you can make fun, and that's fine.
02:13But this is one of those moments where that lottery win happens, the good fortune of John Wall
02:20representing the group up there.
02:22This could be the beginning of something that I have wanted literally my entire life,
02:27a great basketball team here in Washington, D.C.
02:29Again, there are no guarantees, but I knew the other way, the build from the middle,
02:34the Ernie Grunfeld trade away multiple first-round picks for Trevor Ariza,
02:37trying to find a way to win 40 games or whatever.
02:40That wasn't it.
02:41This is it.
02:42There is a chance, finally, that they could be great, and it starts this evening.
02:46And the excitement, GP, is warranted.
02:48Yeah, the build has been ongoing since Michael Winger, Will Dawkins, and Travis Schlenk got to town.
02:54And they started detonating the roster and selling off pieces and trading away assets like Bradley Beal's terrible contract.
03:02And for a while, that detonation phase lingered, and the tank was on, and going to the arena was a
03:10chore.
03:11There were people, season ticket holders, who went a lot and found reasons to enjoy and to hope, and that's
03:18great.
03:18Many people kind of checked out and just sat and watched at home.
03:21This is a sleeping giant of a basketball town, and you have started to see this plan taking shape,
03:30this process coming into focus over the last calendar year with the development of the young players.
03:38Alex Sar, massive breakthrough this past season as the big in the front court who was posting up and living
03:48in the paint
03:49and would routinely go get double-doubles.
03:50I was in the arena for a couple of dominant SAR performances that you start salivating about
03:55and thinking, this guy could be one of the next great big men in the NBA.
03:59They drafted Trey Johnson at six last year.
04:02I still think that was a gift that he fell into their lap.
04:04He was injured off and on this season.
04:06It was a disappointing year.
04:07But he is a lethal sharpshooter from the outside who might play really, really well with Trey Young,
04:13who they just gave a massive extension to yesterday.
04:16We'll talk more about that in a little bit.
04:18But when you look at the kids, whether it's SAR, Keyshawn George, Will Riley, who I think is a special
04:23young player.
04:24What a find he was.
04:25The depth pieces in the next tier down, like Bilal Koulibaly or Bub Carrington,
04:29Trey Johnson's got to be added into the conversation.
04:32They've done a very good job kind of setting the room up with some furniture.
04:36But they still needed a sun in the solar system.
04:40They went out and they got Trey Young to help improve the floor,
04:43to basically elevate the worst-case scenario,
04:45to make sure that they could start to turn a corner.
04:48That they crept up on play-in-game type activity.
04:51But the plan here, Danny,
04:52the whole part of this process that has been missing is,
04:56who is your superstar?
04:58Who is the alpha,
05:00three years from now,
05:01who's going to carry this team deep into the playoffs?
05:03And they've had a hard time here recruiting that player.
05:06You can't get that guy in free agency.
05:08You can't really trade for that guy,
05:10as we found out, with all the money they had.
05:11The best they could do was kind of broken down Anthony Davis
05:14or overpaying Trey Young a little bit.
05:16Those aren't bad options.
05:18But it's probably not, you know, you're not in the Giannis tier.
05:20You're not in the, you know, best in basketball tier.
05:23So where do you get that guy?
05:25You know how you get that guy?
05:26You win the lottery.
05:27And you pick right at number one.
05:30And A.J. DeBonsa or Darren Peterson,
05:33maybe somebody else,
05:34becomes one of the seven to ten best players in the NBA
05:37in the next couple years.
05:38That's the dream.
05:39That's what tonight's about.
05:41That's the idea.
05:42Yeah, and you said it.
05:43As you're gathering, I like the furniture analogy.
05:45You don't know what the style of your room is going to be.
05:47You don't know how this whole thing is going to be decorated.
05:50They were very much, and I think still are to a degree,
05:53in an asset gathering phase.
05:54The deconstruction part happened,
05:56where you get rid of the low ceiling,
05:59we know what this is.
06:00And it's no disrespect to Bradley Beal,
06:01really good player in this league,
06:02but that should not be the best player on your team.
06:05And he was, and they treated him like a superstar.
06:08And you got, you know, 33 win seasons to prove it.
06:10Before you move on, you just mentioned Beal.
06:13What was the low point for you recently as a Wizards fan?
06:16I think when they acted like Bradley Beal
06:20was LeBron James or Steph Curry,
06:22and he got the super-duper, ooper-duper supermax
06:24with the no trade,
06:26taking up, you know, over a third of the salary cap or whatever,
06:29and you just knew that they were kind of boxed in in a way
06:32that you could never advance beyond being a fringe playoff team.
06:37I just felt like I was in basketball purgatory spinning my tires.
06:41That was the worst I felt, honestly.
06:43Where was that for you?
06:44Yeah, that's a really good question.
06:46You know, I talked about my low point with the then Redskins
06:50was when even Mike Shanahan couldn't fix it.
06:54You know what I mean?
06:55When it was like we brought in a serious person to do serious things,
06:58and even that was probably worse than it's ever been.
07:02I go, it'll never work here.
07:03It'll never happen as long as these two boobs are in charge,
07:06or really just Dan Snyder's in charge.
07:08I think for me it was that, I can't remember which year exactly,
07:13but multiple straight years with mid-30s wins running Beal into the ground.
07:19Again, playing among the league leader in minutes.
07:21This is somebody who had to have years cut short
07:23because of chronic shin issues and stress fracture potentials,
07:28all those other kind of things.
07:29And then at some point they decided we're going to treat him,
07:32to your point, as a superstar,
07:33and it was just feeding from scraps from the table.
07:37I want you to sit at the head of the table.
07:41The endeavor to just be okay, I never understood it.
07:46I never got how ownership, according to even Ted Leonsis' own ownership manifesto,
07:52he was violating all the tenets of that manifesto that he produced
07:56early on in his capital's tenureship.
07:58After realizing you can't just buy something,
08:00you can't just go jogger or notes on a couple of guys,
08:02and he said if it's not a championship team,
08:04you've got to break it down and rebuild.
08:05There was no objective way to look at those rosters and say,
08:09yep, championship team.
08:10No way.
08:11They weren't even going to finish fourth in their own crappy division.
08:15And I just go, this rudderless, empty, pointless,
08:19hamster wheel of an exercise,
08:21there's no hope unless somebody has a paradigm shift.
08:24We'll enter the paradigm shift.
08:25But enter, and this is no disrespect to Tommy Shepard, a nice guy,
08:28a good basketball man, but you enter visionaries.
08:32You enter the Dawkins-Schlenk-Winger group to say,
08:37there's more than this.
08:38There is a different way to do it, and it's going to involve some pain.
08:41But these fans, they got pain covered.
08:43They've been doing pain for 50 years.
08:45Well, Tommy Shepard wasn't trying to do this,
08:47but we don't know if he thought this was the right idea or not.
08:51Was it ownership saying, we're not blowing this whole thing up?
08:56We don't do that.
08:56We're not rebuilding, tanking for four years, picking high in the draft,
09:01trying to play for a lottery.
09:03I mean, maybe Shepard didn't think you had to.
09:05And the New York Knicks, to some extent,
09:07just proved that there are other ways to do it.
09:09I think it's really, really hard.
09:10I think landing a plane on that runway is the hardest thing to do in the world.
09:14Quick editorial, because that's been a major talking point among NBA circles.
09:17You let me know when other cities are in New York,
09:20when people just automatically go to New York, L.A., or Miami.
09:23Everybody else has to compete in a different way.
09:24But back to you.
09:25The Wizards are not able to do what the Knicks can do.
09:27Correct.
09:28Or the Heat can do, because they're not New York and Miami.
09:30They're not destination, for whatever reason, cities.
09:33I've always found that weird, by the way.
09:34Same.
09:34I think D.C. and the NBA should be viewed very, very differently.
09:39I think the Wizards should actually be on that New York, Miami level of a destination
09:47where players want to come and set up shop and build their super team.
09:50But we're not.
09:51And it hasn't been.
09:52Never has.
09:52I think that's been proven many years over.
09:55But that having been said, there is an argument to say,
09:59and I've always thought there was only one way to do it necessarily,
10:02which is the way the Wizards are doing it.
10:04And the Knicks, to their credit, have proven that if you're in the right market,
10:07you can absolutely win.
10:08And it just takes a long time.
10:10And, by the way, they haven't won in decades.
10:12Not like it's easy to do.
10:14But I go back to finally giving this a try and making this night possible.
10:20Ted Leonsis, Michael Winger, Will Dawkins have stuck to the script.
10:26They could have abandoned a few different times.
10:28There were no butts in seats.
10:30There's nobody spending any money in concessions.
10:32You're looking at the numbers, and it's a lot of red, I'm sure,
10:35for Ted Leonsis over a couple seasons.
10:37You've got to stick to the plan.
10:40And they did, and they made tonight possible.
10:42Tonight, the NBA draft, we're here at the anthem where the draft party is going to be.
10:47It's not set up yet.
10:48They're kind of getting everything set up, putting cloths on the tables
10:51and still putting out chairs.
10:53But this looks like it's going to be an absolutely beautiful event.
10:57I can't stress enough just how excited I got.
10:59My heart started pounding when I walked in the door.
11:01It feels like a big deal, and it is.
11:04Sixteen years in the making for Wizards fans.
11:07I got texts from a couple buddies that I haven't heard from in years this morning
11:11that growing up I would talk basketball with
11:14or that I would go to Wizards games with when we were kids with our parents
11:18that I don't keep in touch with necessarily.
11:20Like, dude, this is our day.
11:23Big day for the Wizards.
11:24That's the kind of vibe of this day.
11:27It's almost like the groundhog coming out of its hole to, like, look up and go,
11:31can I come out now?
11:32Can I look around?
11:33It's that feel.
11:34The casual conversation isn't just, you know, I can't believe it, the weather.
11:38It's who they're going to take tonight, who they're going to take,
11:39who they're taking tomorrow, what have you heard, what have you heard.
11:41That kind of stuff is fun.
11:42It's exciting.
11:43Let me see if you agree with this text I sent.
11:45So I was texting with our buddy Joe House from the Ringer Fame.
11:48He does all his stuff with Bill Simmons.
11:51And I said, happy draft day, you know, whatever.
11:53He was talking about how nervous he was.
11:54I said, I don't think they can screw this up tonight.
11:56Like, you could tell me that in three years we'll look back and say they didn't take the right player.
12:02Whether they took DeBonsta, like everyone thinks they're going to,
12:05the small forward from Brigham Young, or they take Darren Peterson, the guard from Kansas.
12:10And the other one ends up being the better player.
12:12Like, in three years we can find out, a la Sar being the right pick at one,
12:16and the Wizards got him at two, that that's who you should have taken first.
12:20First, I don't think there is any path tonight to me being frustrated when I leave this building.
12:25There is nothing that could happen tonight that when I put my head down,
12:29I'm not going to be thinking, what a massive win for the team.
12:33I don't think it matters.
12:34I mean, do I prefer DeBonsta narrowly?
12:36Yes, because I think he's safer, and I don't think you can afford to be wrong.
12:39But I've said this a million times.
12:41If it's just about basketball, if it's all the stuff that you and I don't get to know,
12:46because we don't get to interview the players and be around them,
12:48and if health isn't a concern and character and all this stuff,
12:51if it's just basketball, Darren Peterson's the best player in the class.
12:54He's the scorer.
12:55He's the shooter.
12:55I'm not going to be upset if they take Darren Peterson.
12:57No, I won't be upset either.
12:58And here's the beauty of having, to your point you made earlier, good leadership.
13:03It's that I have questions.
13:05Me, Danny Ruyet, fairly informed fan, but that's kind of what this is, right?
13:09How informed?
13:10Not fairly.
13:10I read the same things you guys do.
13:13I'm looking at the same scouts reports that you do.
13:15I'm looking at the same aggregators, the same blogs, the same whatevers to form my opinions.
13:20I watch the same games.
13:21I don't have access to all the things that these guys do.
13:23But I know that the questions that I have as a reasonable person, they have them too.
13:30And if they say it's Peterson, that means those questions were answered beyond appropriately
13:35and beyond like a satisfactory way.
13:37Not only is there no concern, they're excited.
13:39They're bullish, right?
13:40But it's so, whereas if, again, just to borrow again from the then Redskins, I didn't have
13:46that trust that Bruce Allen did his due diligence.
13:47I didn't.
13:48I didn't have the trust that Dan Snyder knew what he was doing when he got off the yacht
13:51and made a pick.
13:52This group did it.
13:53This group has a vision and they have the understanding that I could never have.
13:57So the questions that I've got about Peterson, I think, are very legitimate.
14:01And I don't think it's just, oh, he missed some games.
14:03Lots of guys miss games, man.
14:05Kyrie Irving missed a bunch of games with injury.
14:07Caleb Wilson missed a bunch of games.
14:08This ain't that.
14:09This isn't, he pulled his hamstring.
14:11It doesn't go.
14:12You can't make him go.
14:13This was, frankly, bizarre behavior with an explanation that doesn't necessarily translate
14:19into someone that's going to be available for 82 games for you going forward.
14:23You need to have those questions answered.
14:25If they do have them satisfactorily answered, or even then some, and they're excited about
14:30Peterson, I will be too.
14:31Because to your point, they got a dude.
14:33That guy was put on this earth to put that basketball through the hoop.
14:36He is a gifted scorer.
14:38I mean, there's one part Dwayne Wade.
14:40There's one part Donovan Mitchell.
14:42There's some knockdown shooter to his game.
14:45However you want to get beat, he'll beat you on the offensive end.
14:48It could be a catch and shoot.
14:49It could be off the bounce.
14:50That guy can score on anybody on this planet right now, this minute.
14:54If that's a selection, just fine.
14:55The Peterson thing is growing on me as we get closer to the draft, because there's something
15:00to the idea of him being off the ball at the two, and Trey Young getting him set shots
15:06from the perimeter that he knocks down as the best shooter in the class.
15:10That's just working for me.
15:12I think DeBonsta's the pick, and I think he should be the pick.
15:17But there are a lot of people that have a horse in the race.
15:21You know, I feel this way, frankly, the way I did about quarterback at number two, going
15:27back to 2024, where my preference at the time was Drake May, but I wasn't going to be upset
15:33if they took Jaden Daniels.
15:35I feel that way.
15:36I think I'd prefer DeBonsta, but if they take Peterson, cool.
15:42I don't know that they can go wrong tonight.
15:44Now, eventually, one of those guys will probably be better than the other.
15:48Next, let's make our prediction on how we think this is going to play out at the top
15:52of the board, not just with the Wiz, but with a couple of picks after them.
15:56And then we can take some calls as well.
15:58What do you guys hope happens with the Wizards on the clock at number one?
16:03We're going to be out here at the anthem for the draft party.
16:07We'll be on with the Junkies deep into the evening, monitoring the draft live on the fan
16:13as well.
16:14After the Nationals game, you'll hear live coverage all night long on the fan.
16:19Who do you think they take at number one?
16:21And do you think it's close?
16:23Do you think this decision is tight?
16:25Or do you anticipate that this is something that they've actually known for days, and they're
16:30just keeping a pretty good secret?
16:31800-636-1067.
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