JOHN WALL WAS sitting at the Adorn Bar in the Four Seasons. It was Sunday morning, and the No. 1 selection in the 2010 draft was picking at the bacon on his plate and explaining his superstitions:
They were underneath his crisp navy blue and red Howard University Air Jordan 14 exclusives, he said.
“I’ve always had to play in a pair of Hanes crew socks from Walmart, under my NBA socks,” Wall told ESPN. “And they got to be ultra cushioned. I need them.”
Wall was at the restaurant in downtown Chicago representing his former team, the Washington Wizards, at perhaps the most pivotal point they’ve had in a generation -- since he arrived as a prized prospect 16 years ago.
In between bites, Wall described his beloved good luck charm: a necklace his late mother wore. He last had it on Jan. 29, the night the Wizards celebrated his career. The clamp broke, however. Fortunately, he has a backup: a tattoo on his neck of his mother wearing the necklace.
Just as he pointed to his neck tattoo, a server dropped a metal tray of greens right in front of him, a thunderous clang echoing above the chatter of the patrons.
“Did you see that?” Wall asked, astounded at the jarring spill.
Was this an omen -- an ominous sign of impending bad luck?
There is, of course, a reason for “The Curse O’ Les Boulez,” as former Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser coined it to aptly describe years of calamity and foul luck. Washington hasn’t advanced to the conference finals since 1979, when the then-Bullets lost in the NBA Finals one year after winning the franchise’s only championship. And the Wizards, in a complete teardown, have lost a total of 196 games over the past three seasons.
A year ago, the Wizards shared the best odds to land Cooper Flagg with the top pick but slipped all the way to the sixth slot.
The Wizards had been meticulous for years -- losing and planning and losing some more, all for this moment.
Which is why Wall was wearing the cushioned socks and talking about his mom’s necklace.
ESPN was granted exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the Wizards throughout the draft lottery weekend, from Wall to their front office, seeking to capture a full view of an organization at its most tenuous time.
Either they’d fall, yet again, delaying once more the NBA’s most arduous rebuild, or they’d strike lottery gold and break in an instant a spell of misfortune that had lasted for decades.
“This one feels like it’s a lot more like, ‘We need to do this!’” said Wall, who wanted a better result than when he was previously the team representative in 2011, when Washington got the sixth pick used on Jan Vesely. “I need it. That’s what everybody keeps telling me. You better get it. I hope I bring the good luck. It ain’t like I can hit a button and we get it.”
Four hours later, they got it. Washington became the first team to win the lottery after finishing with the league’s worst record (17-65) since the NBA revamped the lottery format in 2019. It was the franchise’s first lottery win since Wall Dougie’d his way into the hearts of D.C. fans in 2010. And it represents the next step in a franchise transformation that saw the Wizards trade for All-Stars Trae Young and Anthony Davis earlier this year.
When Michael Winger, the president of Monumental Basketball and the Wizards’ lone representative inside the lottery’s drawing room, realized the franchise had won the coveted No. 1 pick, he did not dance or emote, largely because there was no one for him to celebrate with.
Instead, Winger quietly gave a thumbs up and opened his journal, which includes a photo of his wife and four kids, and wrote the winning sequence of ping-pong balls -- 4, 2, 1, 13 -- along with the combinations of the other three lottery picks.
“I have a terrible memory and I write down as much as I can because I know that tomorrow I will not remember what happened today,” Winger said. “Not quite like the movie ‘Memento.’ But not too far removed.”
After the winning ping-pong numbers, Winger jotted down what he couldn’t blurt out in the room.
“F--- yeah!”
SOME 1,300 MILES away, at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, Wizards owner Ted Leonsis was celebrating Mother’s Day with his wife, Lynn. They hoped they would have something more to celebrate in just a matter of hours.
To burn off his nervous energy, Leonsis decided to go for a morning run, choosing to jog up and down a nearby drawbridge instead of his usual route along the beach.
As Leonsis cooled down -- ping-pong-ball combinations bouncing around his brain -- he saw what he thought was a needlelike bug flying toward him. He instinctively raised his right arm when he noticed a black cord wrapped around his forearm with a hook attached to the end.
This was no insect.
A fisherman had cast his line and caught Leonsis’ forearm instead. Luckily, the it didn’t leave a scratch.
“I’m staring down at this five-inch hook that honestly would’ve taken my eye out, would’ve done real damage,” he told ESPN. “It shakes me up a little bit.”
When Leonsis reached the bottom of the bridge, a man was on the phone asking someone for money to go see his mom on Mother’s Day. Leonsis reached into his pocket and gave the man the cash he needed. The man couldn’t believe his good fortune. Leonsis was happy to pay forward the good luck he felt he had just experienced on the bridge.
Leonsis returned home and told his wife about the fishhook. She asked him what he was thinking as the draft lottery neared.
“Well, I’ve either used up all the luck I could ever have in the last half hour,” Leonsis replied, “or luck runs in threes and this is what’s going to happen.”
Ted and Lynn watched the lottery unfold while on FaceTime with their son, Zach, Monumental Sports’ president of media and new enterprises. Once the Wizards got past the fourth pick and their envelope had yet to be revealed, Leonsis turned to his wife.
“We’re going to win this,” he told her.
Having that kind of confidence has been rare for a franchise that has felt cursed at times. Washington has dealt with injuries to stars from Bernard King to Bradley Beal to Wall, failed trades such as the one that sent 25-year-old Chris Webber to the Sacramento Kings for 33-year-old Mitch Richmond and self-inflicted wounds such as the Gilbert Arenas locker room gun scandal.
Not even Michael Jordan was immune. Jordan played two seasons with the Wizards, failing to reach the playoffs both times. However, his worst move with the franchise came off the court: drafting Kwame Brown with the No. 1 pick in 2001 as the team’s lead executive, before unretiring later that summer. Jordan would later be shocked when team owner Abe Pollin unceremoniously fired the legend in 2003.
Leonsis, who has been the Wizards’ majority owner for 16 years, has won a Stanley Cup as owner of the Capitals and a WNBA championship as owner of the Mystics. The Wizards, however, have not been to the playoffs since a first-round exit in 2021. They haven’t won 50 games in a season since 1978-79, before the advent of the 3-point line, when Wes Unseld roamed the paint.
Since their most recent playoff appearance, the Wizards have gone 120-290 (.293) -- the worst record in the NBA during that span. They have lost at least 16 straight games four separate times since 2023-24, as many as the rest of the league combined over that stretch, according to ESPN Research. And in March, they allowed Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo to score 83 points, the second most in a single game in NBA history.
“That wasn’t pain to me,” Leonsis said when asked about the Adebayo game and the pain of losing over the past three seasons. “I was told to expect it [the losses piling up]. And I knew to expect it. You live through it and, as I expected, it doesn’t matter now.”
Winger and Will Dawkins, the Wizards’ general manager, put together a four-phase plan to revitalize and reshape the Wizards.
“Deconstruct, lay the foundation, then you build it,” Dawkins said of the phases. “And then eventually fortify it.”
The trades for Young and Davis, combined with landing this draft pick, have the Wizards working on Phases 2 and 3 simultaneously. Once the team starts having success on the court, that’s when Phase 4 will begin.
“That’s when you know what your house looks like and you know you’ve got to add the fine detail,” Dawkins said. “Like, ‘Oh, we built this house, but it really needs a balcony’ or ‘it really needs solar panels instead of electric.’ [Right now, it’s] a lot of wood.”
Sunday’s lottery luck provides the potential for a new, foundational pillar for a franchise used to disaster always being around the corner.
“[Sunday], I feel, was an incredible day of luck,” Leonsis said. “If you watch ‘Final Destination,’ that’s all I could think of was, ‘Here I am. I’m going to end up in the hospital. I will have lost an eye and we’ll pick fifth.”
Instead, he has both of his eyes -- and the top pick in a draft most experts predict to be generational.
Leonsis had the patience to let Winger and Dawkins see their plan through. Leonsis knows from experience these plans don’t change a team’s fate overnight. The Capitals drafted Alex Ovechkin, now the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer, in 2005. The Caps made the playoffs for the first time with Ovechkin three seasons later then lifted the Stanley Cup in 2018 -- after nine postseason exits. Leonsis trusts the watchful eyes of Winger and Dawkins to eventually bring similar success to the Wizards.
“I told Michael after the [lottery],” Leonsis cracked, “‘I fell for your plan -- hook, line and sinker.”
DAWKINS HOPPED INTO his navy Jeep Wagoneer rental about two hours before the lottery began. He set his navigation and picked gospel singer/rapper Kirk Franklin as the soundtrack to his drive on this gorgeous Chicago day.
“It’s Sunday,” Dawkins said. “Gospel Sunday.”
The Wizards needed some divine intervention. They’d won the lottery twice in history, coming away with Brown and Wall. But the franchise is much more accustomed to stinging disappointment. Since 1992, the Bullets/Wizards have fallen 11 times in the lottery, having to settle for a pick lower than where they finished in the regular season.
Last year’s drop -- from as high as No. 1 to No. 6 -- was the largest in franchise history. The team ended up selecting Texas guard Tre Johnson, who averaged 12.2 points in 60 games as a rookie.
This time, Dawkins wanted to clear his mind and not think about the lottery all day long. So he changed his routine, too. Instead of driving to Chicago’s Navy Pier, where the event was being held, he joined his scouts at 167 Green. Nestled 17 floors above the Fulton Market District, the event space has a basketball court surrounded by panoramic views of the Chicago skyline -- a much more uplifting sight than the lottery drawing room he had sat in the previous two years.
As the lottery unfolded, the Wizards GM and seven members of his evaluation team played pickup basketball. Dawkins had instructed his staff to mute their phones and smart watches. No lottery updates. Just hoops with a view and plenty of trash talk.
Former NBA player Ish Smith, now a pro evaluation scout with the team, arrived late with Marshall Forney, assistant GM of the Wizards’ G League Capital City Go-Go team. Smith had to run to Niketown to pick up a pair of the pink and green A’ja Wilson A’Two sneakers. Perhaps it was fortuitous -- Wilson had been the No. 1 pick in the 2018 WNBA draft.
“The A’jas, that’s tough,” Dawkins told Smith as he laced up the shoes.
Minutes before the start of the lottery, Dawkins went to work on the court. He was focused on bounce passes to teammate Amber Nichols, director of amateur evaluation, rather than the ping-pong balls bouncing three miles away.
Travis Schlenk, senior VP of player personnel, was at the lottery and supposed to call Dawkins when the lottery ended around 2:30 p.m. local time -- and not any earlier.
“If you get a call at 2:15, you know you got five,” Dawkins said. “You get a call at 2:18, you know you got four. If you get a call closer to 2:30, you know that you got a top-three pick.”
The Wizards went into the day knowing they couldn’t drop lower than fifth and were confident this draft -- headlined by college stars like Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, Duke’s Cameron Boozer, North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson and Arkansas’ Darius Acuff Jr. -- would yield at least five players with All-Star ceilings. ESPN draft analyst Jeremy Woo projects BYU’s AJ Dybantsa to be selected by Washington.
“This draft is pretty deep,” Dawkins said before the lottery started. “To know you can’t fall further than five in a draft like this, you go in pretty confident knowing that you’re going to get a good player anywhere you go... I’ll say this: It’s definitely more than a one-person draft and there’s always a guy that pops.
“I would say the Wizards can’t have a bad day today.”
Just before 2:30 p.m., Ketsia Colimon, vice president of strategic communications, interrupted the pickup game and asked the group if they wanted to know the lottery results.
“No,” Dawkins replied, the group echoing him. “Let us finish this game.”
She asked if they were sure. Feeling that there could be good news, the group relented.
Colimon pointed both her index fingers up in the air. The group celebrated with chest bumps and high-fives. They even resumed playing for 30 more minutes.
“It’s definitely not a one-person draft,” Dawkins reiterated Monday. “But it’s now on us to find the one person who’s best for the Washington Wizards.”
UNLIKE THE JARRING interruption to Wall’s breakfast, Winger’s morning started with the first of two fortuitous signs: At Torali restaurant inside the Ritz-Carlton Chicago, Winger noticed his salt-and-pepper-bearded server had an uncanny resemblance to Capitals’ superstar Ovechkin.
Hours later, he rode in a Mercedes SUV to the lottery and arrived at a packed parking garage at the Navy Pier. Somehow, Winger spotted an open parking space only steps away from the entrance to the lottery.
A year ago, Winger was sick at home when Washington sank to sixth. This year, a healthy Winger was about to sit in the drawing room for the first time.
When he landed the franchise’s first No. 1 pick in 16 years, Winger wondered to himself, “Did this really just happen?”
Sam Presti, Oklahoma City executive vice president/GM who hired both Winger and Dawkins with the Thunder, eventually went over and embraced his former assistant GM from 2010 to 2017.
“You guys have worked your ass off for this and I’m so happy for you,” Winger said of what Presti told him.
At the team’s dinner at Adalina Prime following the lottery victory, Winger celebrated with Dawkins, coach Brian Keefe, assistant coach David Vanterpool and two long tables full of staff members.
“There’s a lot of pain that you endure for the possibility of being in this position,” Winger said. “This No. 1 pick primarily is afforded to us by virtue of the pain that we voluntarily endured. The pain was damn near intolerable while we were enduring it.
“Would we in retrospect endure that pain again to have this opportunity? The answer is yes, we would. ... Losing streaks, winning [fewer than] 20 games for three straight years. Trading away good players who are good for your culture ... All that’s pain.”
After dinner, the work began. Winger, Dawkins and staff members met to begin outlining the draft -- their own plans, what they believe might be the plans for other teams and more. For the next six weeks, the leverage is theirs.
They’ll consider all options in a summer when the Milwaukee Bucks will listen to offers on superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, sources told ESPN’s Shams Charania.
“We go into any draft with all of our options open,” Dawkins said Monday when asked about consideration of trading the pick. “Not saying that’s necessarily the intent to do something, but if you would just look at our track record. ... We’ve moved up, moved around, moved back. We’re not going to [deviate] just because we have No. 1. We’ll weigh our options and try to do what’s best for the organization long term.”
For the first time in a generation, the Wizards can realistically examine these questions. But Leonsis and the Washington front office know full well what the symbolism of the No. 1 pick in this particular draft means to a city starving for winning basketball.
Wall said when it got down to Washington and Utah, he peeked to see what deputy commissioner Mark Tatum would pull out of the envelope.
“I see a little [Utah] purple and I’m like, ‘Whoa!’” Wall told ESPN. “[Washington] really did it.”
In another symbol of the Wizards’ fortunes turning, the protected first-round pick the team traded along with Wall to the Houston Rockets for Russell Westbrook in 2020 had a succession of protections that came down to 1-through-8 in 2026. The Wizards were able to keep that pick -- which conveys to two future second-round picks -- and win the lottery with Wall on Mother’s Day.
Wall felt like he had a little help from above, too.
“I feel like she was there,” Wall said of his late mother, Frances Pulley. “I feel like God was there. Both of them.
“It’s a full-circle moment for me being that No. 1 pick, then to represent the Wizards and they end up getting another No. 1. What are the odds of that?”
