The 2025-26 NBA season projections are coming in, and we’re starting to see how good (or not so good) teams will be this fall and winter. For the Washington Wizards, there isn’t much hope that they will win more than 20 games this season. According to an ESPN model released yesterday, they are projected to be the worst NBA team overall.
First, a hat tip to this feed post by TrillBroDude (yes, he is an SB Nation employee) who shared this link. According to Kevin Pelton of ESPN, his statistical based
model on regular season projects has the Wizards projected to get just 14.2 wins in 2025-26, worst in the Eastern Conference and worst in the NBA overall.
To be fair, Pelton says that he doesn’t think that the Wizards would only win just 14 or so games this season:
15. Washington Wizards
Projected wins: 14.2
ESPN BET over/under total: 20.5Why they project to be worse than their total: Given how my model tends to compress the expected standings to avoid bad misses, this is a shockingly low projection for the Wizards. In fact, it’s the worst I’ve calculated for a team since adopting this model in 2010. After trading away veterans at the deadline and again this past summer, Washington doesn’t have a single player who rates in the league’s top 130.
We are still waiting on our SB Nation Reacts survey results to our survey regarding how many wins the Wizards will get this year. But I would think that fans would expect more than 14 wins. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
