By trading Bradley Beal, the Wizards are accepting their fate: it's time for them to rebuild. In fact, it's been time for years, even if they've been too enraptured with the possibility of chasing the 8th seed to notice. With a legitimate All Star in Bradley Beal leading the charge alongside Kyle Kuzma and Kristaps Porzingis , the Wizards have been too good to become truly bad; they existed in the dreaded middle space, doomed to years and years of underwhelming late lottery draft picks. But even as the Wizards sink into sub-mediocrity, they still need structure—the difference between the rudderless Rockets and the ascendant Thunder is that one team maintained a strong culture while the other their young guys to be as indulgent and decadent as they pleased. As such, here are two reasons why the Wizards must keep Kristaps Porzingis in the wake of the Bradley Beal trade.

1. He's a good fit 

More than the 23 points per game or 38.5 percent three point shooting or the 1.5 blocks per game, Kristaps Porzingis is a good player because of the way that he fuses all these discrete aspects of the game into a single, coherent whole. He's the kind of player that every team dreams of having—there are maybe two other guys alive who can match Porzingis' level of rim protection and long range marksmanship.  Accordingly, Porzingis is the ideal fit in any lineup or configuration. His shooting allows the Wizards to stomach a non-shooting wing prospect like Anthony Black without compromising their spacing; his shot blocking empowers them to add an offense-forward wing prospect like Gradey Dick or Leonard Miller.

Porzingis may never be the superstar that his early years with the Knicks portended, but that doesn't mean he's a bad player. He's a very good one, in fact. More, he's good in ways that much more easily scalable than the oversized Carmelo Anthony cosplay that he adopted in his early years. Similarly, last season marked the first time that Porzingis seemed fully comfortable in his body since he tore his ACL in 2018. Whereas he was once too light in the pants to create his own shot beyond jacking contested jumpers, he has rounded out his interior scoring and shot a career-high 55.9 percent from twos as a result.

The cliche that a player makes his teammates better is usually reserved for pass-happy guards, but it's never more applicable than with Porzingis. More precisely, he engenders an environment in which his teammates can easily succeed. He's a frictionless, endlessly useful co-pilot, the kind of guy who instantly makes life easier for the guys around him. And for the Wizards, for whom player development has never been a strong suit and has now become more important than ever, Porzingis could be a godsend.

2. He's tradable

In all likelihood, Kristaps Porzingis doesn't have much time left in Washington—the combination of his enduring goodness and impending free agency this summer will surely lure contenders to try to trade for him or sign him outright. By the time you read this, he might already be on his way to Boston as the Celtics hash out a three team trade with the Wizards and Clippers. In this sense, since the Wizards are almost certainly to lose their newly minted best player at some point, they might as well get something in return. If Porzingis leaves in free agency, the Wizards will be left with nothing outside of some cap space; if they trade him, they can guarantee some sort of return that can go towards the early stages of their rebuild.

Throughout the Wizards decades-long fallow period, they have consistently mismanaged their assets. Through a cocktail of bad luck and bad decisions, the Wizards have managed to consistently fumble their way into buying high and selling low. In just the last six months alone, the Wizards turned former lottery pick Rui Hachimura into a pile of second round draft picks, only for Hachimura to instantly emerge as an important piece for the Lakers' playoff run to the Western Conference Finals. Even more gallingly, they bungled the Beal deal, refusing to trade him until injuries and an outrageous contract extension rendered him essentially untradeable.

But with former Clippers lieutenant Michael Winger in charge, the Wizards have a chance to reverse years and years (and years and years) of incompetence. Here is a front office that will hopefully operate with more foresight and imagination than a college kid trying to find a place to keep drinking after the bars close. Although the Wizards have been burned by big extensions in the fairly recent past (see: Beal, Bradley or Wall, John), keeping Porzingis is clearly the better option from a team building perspective than letting him walk.